Bee Care Tour Promotes Importance of Honey Bees

For the next three months Bayer CropScience has a mobile Bee Care Tour traveling around the country. The purpose of the tour is to foster education and collaboration among growers, beekeepers, researchers and other interested in honey bee health. The tour began in Pullman earlier this month. This week found the tour at the Commodity Classic in San Antonio.

Beekeeper Veldon Sorensen shares how we can ALL do our part to improve honey bee health and nutrition.

Sorensen: “I think the most important thing from a beekeeper’s perspective is that if they can plant flowers, or allow wildflowers to grow — that is the best thing they can do. We’re suffering from bee nutrition all across the United States — we’ve taken a lot of CRP ground out. I grew up on a farm and we’ve taken out all of our ditches and replaced them with sprinkler systems. So there isn’t a lot of bee forage — that would be the first one from a beekeeper’s perspective. From a Bayer perspective, we’d like to tell people to follow the labels. The labels are written so that we do as much as we can to protect all of the environment — particularly bees. So if they would follow the labels — I think those are the two big messages I would like to get out.”

One element of the tour is a honey tasting bar.

Sorensen: “We had people who came through that didn’t realize that honeys had different flavors depending on what the bees forage on. I have some honey out of Idaho that were was on mint. Wow it is just amazing to watch the people’s faces when they can taste the mint.”