Engaging Faith Communities for Bee Protection
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Bees for Peace promotes pollinator protection through faith communities and humanitarian organizations. In addition to other activities, Bees for Peace seeks to establish blooming feeding sites for bees and other pollinators on the grounds of houses of worship and other locations. These feeding sites form a “peace network,” as bees, imagined as peace ambassadors, visit the various feeding sites, thereby uniting disparate communities of faith through this cross-pollination. |
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Bees for Peace also seeks to create connections between faith communities and environmentalist organizations. Through these connections, people of faith gain the technical and scientific know-how they need to mobilize both their spiritual and material resources to protect bees and other pollinators, while environmentalists improve their communication and outreach to this major sector of civil society. Furthermore, by uniting diverse faith communities with each other in the joint endeavor of protecting pollinators, Bees for Peace fosters interfaith dialog, cooperation and subsequently greater social harmony. Bees for Peace thus strives to create and preserve the common ground, both ecologically and socially, that we all share. Begun in Cologne, Germany, in 2018, Bees for Peace was awarded recognition as an “official project of the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity.”
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Honey is only one of many gifts we receive from bees. We can thank not only honey bees but also the relatively unknown wild bees for our fruit, vegetables and flowers. These are only possible when the pollen – that dusty material in the middle of a flower – is carried from one flower to another. This pollen is what fertilizes the flowers and allows them to develop and transform into the food we and other animals eat. Hence, bees of all kinds provide us and the rest of nature with an irreplaceable service. |
Yet now, these animals are dying out:Our fields of grain have become too big for them to fly across, and the poisons used to kill insects that might eat our crops are deadly to bees as well. Should they die, we will lose a significant portion of our cultural and religious heritage as well as much of what we eat. The loss will be catastrophic.
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That’s why we started Bees for Peace.