Burt Talks to the Bees

Via the Sustainable Brands newsletter:

Burt’s Bees is collaborating with artists and experts at the Pollinator Partnership to generate greater public awareness about the importance of honeybees to agriculture and the threats they face.

For such small, short-lived creatures, bees do a lot of heavy lifting to keep life on Earth in balance. In fact, an estimated one-third of the food on Earth depends on pollination by bees. Because they are instrumental to biodiversity, they are what scientists call indicator species, functioning as an alarm system for the health of ecosystems.

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Nearly every scientist agrees that all bees need nesting habitats and a variety of healthy flower food to thrive – and they’re in short supply. Humans have used up all the land – we’ve planted crops from field edge-to-edge, lawns from yard to yard (no bee food there), and fancy ornamental plants where once scruffy natives used to stand. In most agricultural settings today, bees find only one kind of food for days and weeks on end, which is unhealthy (and perhaps boring) for the insects.

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This June for National Pollinator Week, Burt’s Bees will premiere “Burt Talks to the Bees”, a series of three short films created by Isabella Rossellini, actor, director and Burt impersonator. The films introduce the bees – the queen, the workers and the drones – in an effort to make viewers more sympathetic to their plight.

The first in the video series introduces us to worker bees and how honey is made. The Sustainable Brands piece outlines many of the reasons we are active in advancing the scientific understanding of pollinators and reviving the tradition of meliponiculture.