Free Bee Help

Free Bee Help

Free Bee Help. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Dealing with noxious weeds can be a bit of a double edged sword. They can quickly invade and take over your farm, orchard or home. But they are also a huge benefit to native bee populations. Alison Halpern, Executive Secretary for the Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board has come up with an alternative.

HALPERN: There was such a dispute about noxious weed control among a lot of the beekeepers, especially the commercial growers where they feel that so many of our noxious weeds are such great forage for bees, the problem with those noxious weeds is that they have huge impacts on other components of agriculture.

Halpern says that’s when an idea formed.

HALPERN: I felt that weed control and bee forage conservation didn’t need to be mutually exclusive. We could still encourage people to control their noxious weeds but we can also encourage them to plant non-invasive or forage for the bees so that they’re benefitting everyone in their actions.

They’re giving away free packets of “pollinator-friendly” seeds from the Ed Hume Seed Company in Puyallup.

HALPERN: They already had this pollinator blend. We looked at the list and we asked the seed company to take off one of the species because we’d heard it was becoming a little bit invasive. We used a really great branding company to come up with the Bee-U-tify cover. People have been thinking that this seed packet is the bees knees, they really like them.

Get a free seed packet, while supplies last, through your local county weed board or email noxiousweeds@agr.wa.gov.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.

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