Bee Bffs: Why Bees Need Us—and How UH Residents Can Help
San Diego was recently honored with a “Bee City USA” designation by the Xerces Society, which may lead us to believe that our city is trying hard to save bees from the many perils they face. So far, though, there has been no word on concrete action tied to our new bee-friendly status. Unfortunately, it’s not unusual in San Diego for “green”-sounding official pronouncements to look good on paper but amount to very little progress. It’s likely up to us to act without city leadership If we want to actually save bees.
And we should want to save them. Bees and other pollinators are our BFFs whether we know it or not. We wouldn’t have much to eat if they didn’t work their magic on food crops (including the crops eaten by animals who land on our dinner plates). All sorts of plants, animals, and entire ecosystems rely on insects as keystone species in the biological web of life that we’re a part of.
One disheartening example: losing trillions of insects to climate change and poisoning has led to over 3 billion fewer birds in this country than we had 50 years ago. Alongside human encroachment on habitat, climate change and pesticides are to blame. Other factors are involved, but bird population collapses have mostly been the result of their insect food sources dying off, and those insects have disappeared because the climate is hotter and drier, and because we’re poisoning them. Birds can’t eat insects that have disappeared. Dead bees don’t pollinate plants. All animals, human and otherwise, will at some point suffer the effects of lost food sources as bees and other insects die off.
What do we do? Buy organic, for one thing. More expensive? Usually. Worth cutting back in other areas to afford? Absolutely, if we value sustaining our way of life. Buy in-season produce, too. No South American-grown piece of fruit is worth the climate impacts of transporting out-of-season crops to the northern hemisphere, killing ecosystems in the process. We should also push the city hard to replace all the trees and shrubs we’ve lost to new giant apartment buildings in the past few years. And continuing to fight climate change is key, as we all know.
It should go without saying that people should never apply pesticides or herbicides around active pollinators, where pollinators might feed within 8 hours of spraying, or when there is any breeze at all. The least destructive time to apply such poisons is before sunrise or after sunset when the air is still. Better yet, stop using pesticides and herbicides. Seriously, they’re killing us. Sustainable landscaping and gardening strategies that make those poisons unnecessary are easy to find from many sources, including the local Master Gardeners program and the County’s website - San Diego Sustainable Landscapes .
Let the politicians smile for the cameras and congratulate one another on new decorative terminology. We’ve got work to do. Our BFFs need us.
