6/25/2008

Meet Your Pollinators, June 28, Chatham Co.

Subj: [NCSBA-Chapters] National Pollinator week and SaveTheHives.com

This week (June 22-28) is National Pollinator Week (http://www.pollinator.org/pollinator_week_2008.htm). It is the second annual National Pollinator Week, initially proclaimed by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and a unanimous vote of the U.S. Senate in 2007.

The purpose of Pollinator Week is to teach pollinator-friendly practices and raise public awareness of the importance of the bees, beetles, butterflies, moths, flies, birds, and bats that are needed to produce 80 percent of our flowering plants and one third of our human food crops.

The National Academy of Sciences has reported that there is direct evidence of the decline of some pollinator species in North America. And, recently, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) of honey bees has alarmed the agricultural industry.

To celebrate, the Chatham County Center of North Carolina Cooperative Extension and the Chatham County Beekeepers' Association will be holding a very special celebration of National Pollinator Week on Saturday, June 28, from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.

The event is sponsored by Chatham Mills Development Corporation (see http://www.chathammillscenter.com/pages/newhomepage.html)
and hosted by Chatham Marketplace
(http://www.chathammarketplace.coop/) at The Lawn at Chatham Mills in Pittsboro, NC.

Outreach activities will include beekeeping demonstrations, an observation hive, and stickers identifying the variety of fruits and vegetables pollinated by bees.

We hope that next year other local chapters of the NCSBA and CES
Centers might engage in similar efforts, as this is a fantastic means of drawing attention to the importance of honey bees to our food supply.

Also, I bring your attention to another effort that we are launching this week to celebrate National Pollinator Week. Some local beekeepers have developed the "Feral Bee Project" website to map, track, and monitor feral bees nests across the state (http://www.savethehives.com/fbp/).

The site is still being developed, but we introduce it this week to start collecting information on non-managed honey bee colonies. If you know of any honey bees living outside of beehives, we encourage you to complete the simple online form so that we may capture these reports. We found our first "bee tree" this morning near Lake Jordan. We have uploaded the info onto the site, and it will likely be the subject of a newspaper report.

As always, let me know if you have questions, and I hope you enjoy your National Pollinator Week.

David R. Tarpy
Assistant Professor and Extension Apiculturist
Department of Entomology, Campus Box 7613
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-7613
TEL: (919) 515-1660

http://entomology.ncsu.edu/apiculture
david_tarpy@ncsu.edu

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