What’s buzzing there? That question will be central this weekend: it is time for the national bee count again. Pieter Posthumus of Landscape Management Drenthe calls on everyone to participate on 23 and 24 April. “Make sure to count!” he says.
The census is mainly organized to make people more aware of the importance of bees. Bees are extremely important for pollination, explains Posthumus. That pollination is crucial to the ability of plants to grow fruit. As humans – and many other animals too – we owe our food to bees. “If there weren’t bees, there wouldn’t be people, they are that important,” Posthumus says.
Next weekend, the focus will be on the wild bee. Unlike honey bees, wild bees are solitary. As a result, they cannot compete very well with honeybees, which form a colony by the thousands. There simply aren’t enough flowers left for the wild bees to get pollen from.
We often hear the slogan: save the bees! But the answer to that is not to release more honeybees. It would be better to give the wild a helping hand, for example by leaving dandelions.
