Exciting News Beegether Members!
Previously, I checked my email, and I realized my formatting was a bit wonky...thanks to the help of some of my Beegether friends! My pictures were HUGE, yet my words were miniscule. To resolve this issue, I built a website/blog, beegether.weebly.com. Yes, you read it here first! Beegether is getting a website! But before I tell you about your action and how you can help spread the word, let's learn a bit about the secret behind the queen, royal jelly. You may wonder how a queen as a baby is different from other worker bees. The answer lies in two words, royal jelly. Royal jelly, also called bee milk, sounds just like what it is, a jellylike substance that is fed to the royal bee, aka the queen, to create a matriarch for the hive. As a baby, all bees are fed royal jelly for three days, except the queen is fed royal jelly for the duration of her stay in the cell, as a larvae, which is the scientific name for a baby bee. When the workers decide they need a new queen because the other is dying or already dead, instead of ceasing to give royal jelly to a would be worker, the bees continue the diet of royal jelly, creating a queen. Most often the bees will make a few queens so they will fight for their position as queen, and the hive will have the strongest selection. The queens who lost have died from the fight, therefore there are not two queens within the colony. The epigenetics of feeding the bee royal jelly triggers gene expression to create larger ovaries, and a forty times longer life span compared to a worker bee. Royal jelly comes from the head of the worker bees...their sisters. Appetizing, right? Want to learn more about royal jelly? Here is a great article: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/royal-jelly-isnt-makes-queen-bee-queen-bee/ My action and your action is to bee a pollinator...spread the good news! This week, you will be spreading the word about beegether.weebly.com, and letting people know it even exists! My website will be an easy way for your friends and family to see and share our journey in saving the bees. Each email will be sent to you, but also with a link to my blog so you can easily comment and give feedback, or perhaps be able to see the words a bit clearer. After you share beegether.weebly.com with five people, post on my blog that you have visited. My website makes it easy for me to hear from you, with surveys on my blog page, and a contact me space on my contact page. You can also request a bee topic of interest for me to cover on my weekly email. Lastly, see what started it all, on the homepage. Thanks for all of your support in making Beegether possible. Let's use the Internet, email, and websites to spread the news to save the bees! A special shout out and huge thank you to JJ for teaching me how to use Weebly. A Busy Bee, Natasha 1. Your action
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Hello New-Bees!
Welcome to Beegether, where you'll bee able to be apart of a unique community of people interested in making a bee change! Our first email will be highlighting a special species of bees and one action you can take to help all bees. Did you know, most bees live a solitary life? You may be familiar with honey bees, but this is only one species of bees. There are mining bees, leaf cutters, and mason bees, too. The one that surprised me the most was the mining bee I found at the Agua Hedionda Lagoon. In the mining bee community, ladies rear their own eggs, and only sting when you seem to be threatening her babies. However, though these bees rarely sting, they only hurt as much as a 1.0 on the Schmidt sting scale. These bees are only active for a couple of weeks of the year. Their burrows can be up to 60 centimeters deep, as each of the ladies has her own hole to birth her own young. This species of bee lives underground, digging a hole down in a curved manner as to stop rain from coming in and then the bee nests there. My action and your action is to take you business to small town garden shops until Home Depot and Lowe's phase out the use of neonicotinoids. Neonicotinoid is an insecticide and is banned in Europe because of the harm it brings to bees, though it is still allowed in America. This is like bringing a black rhino, an endangered species, to a very appealing basin of water, which is an essential part of life, and dumping your hazardous waste into it, making the rhino very sick and eventually dying. Luring an animal into a death trap is basically what Lowe's and Home Depot are doing. And do you think they are announcing to the world that they are killing bees by blanketing plants with neonicotinoid on flowers grown to attract bees? Nope. They're keeping it secret and phasing them out until 2018 and 2019, Home Depot, and Lowe's respectively. Kind and genuine folks, like you, are out there to plant sunflower for the bees, only to find out they are not really helping the bees, are we going to boycott these plants? Yes, I will! I ask that you would boycott Lowe's and Home Depot's plant department too. Let's bee-together in our actions to stand up for our pollinators, the bees, Beegether. Instead, you can shop at Pearson's Garden, one of my favorite places to shop. The luscious green stretched throughout the property, herbs and flowers of every kind linger, just waiting to be picked. The large variety of quality plants are all organically grown, and free of any neonicotinoids. In fact, an employee told us, when we purchased our plants, how to repel pests naturally. This amazing garden where I found seven varieties of mint is located at 1150 Beverly Dr, Vista, CA 92084. You can see their website at http://pearsonsgardens.com/ Check it out! Want to know more? Read about the use of Neonicotinoids at: http://www.foe.org/news/news-releases/2014-06-new-tests-find-bee-killing-pesticides-in-51-percent-of-bee-friendly-plants A Busy Bee, Natasha🐝 1. Your Action 2. Mining Bee Holes |
Meet the Blogger!Hi there! I'm Natasha. I blog on bees, gardening, making a change, and blogging. I hope you are inspired to make a difference!
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April 2017
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