The Mission

Saving the bees is no easy task. After deciding that the bees were the focus of our project, we did extensive research on the bees. We found out more about the bees, the different species, and most importantly, why they are disappearing. As stated in "What's All the Buzz?", many scientists believe that a number of factors are contributing to the bee crisis. Some of these factors include pesticides and human intervention with beekeeping. So, after learning more about the bees we intentionally decided that we wanted to spread awareness about the issue and raise money to donate to a foundation that we found called, The Honeybee Conservancy. We promptly made a twitter account, @HelpMeHoney20, and set to work sending out tweets to raise awareness about the bees. We were still at a loss about the best way to raise money. We pondered a bake sale, selling honey sticks, a raffle and other fundraising possibilities that could get us a sizable donation to give to The Honeybee Conservancy.

Then in our research we discovered the idea of a bee garden. A bee garden is a garden that is focused on flowers and other plants that provide sufficient pollen in order to help out the bees. We researched the types of plants that would make good bee gardens like asters, lilac and zinnias and learned to avoid pesticides and herbicides. A possibility was a bee garden in our high school or in another community space or even just getting people to grow them at their own homes. But, the bee garden was only a brief phase in our project and the project once again took a turn when we discovered the mason bee.

The mason bee is a bee species that is an extremely efficient pollinator - even better than honey bees-, non-aggressive, low maintenance and is in much more trouble than the honey bee. We found out that the mason bee is native to our area and wondered how we could help. This is when we thought of the idea of placing mason bee homes in a community garden at Tilly Foster Farm. Mason bee homes are small wooden houses that are filled with empty tubes which simulate the empty reeds that mason bees use in nature to lay eggs. These tubes are packed with mud by the bees and the next spring, new bees emerge. So, we thought of this idea and found out that the community garden is run by our local highway department and we gave them a call and scheduled a meeting. We met with some members of the highway department who loved the idea and thought it was mutually beneficial to both the endangered bees and the gardeners and their plants. Then the only issue was the money in order to make this happen. We decided to set up a GoFundMe account which we shared in Twitter and Facebook and wound up raising over $250, which was plenty enough to buy the homes. With the money, two mason bee homes, mason bee attractant, and plenty of the tubes were bought with over $100 to spare. The extra money was then donated to The Honeybee Conservancy as our original project called for. Since the homes were not able to be installed in time for the bees, next spring we hope to return to the bee homes and see if they were successful.