The Sustainable Souls Project: Save the Honey Bees - The Sustainable Souls Project July 2017

Hello and Welcome to The Sustainable Souls Project July Post.

The Sustainable Souls Project is a monthly artist collaboration inspired by sustainability issues, concerns, ideas, and thoughts. Each month, we will pick a sustainability topic and create awareness through art, using the monthly theme as inspiration. Projects may include art-journaling, mixed media, assemblage and more. The idea is to create awareness around Sustainability through art, one paint stroke at a time! We hope to educate, entertain, and share pretty things for both humans and the earth.

July's theme is a very important theme. Honey Bees are crucial to the environment and aide in the pollination and growth of many of our food products.

"Honey bees — wild and domestic — perform about 80 percent of all pollination worldwide. A single bee colony can pollinate 300 million flowers each day. Grains are primarily pollinated by the wind, but fruits, nuts and vegetables are pollinated by bees. Seventy out of the top 100 human food crops — which supply about 90 percent of the world’s nutrition — are pollinated by bees.

Biologists have found more than 150 different chemical residues in bee pollen, a deadly “pesticide cocktail” according to University of California apiculturist Eric Mussen. The chemical companies Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, Dow, DuPont and Monsanto shrug their shoulders at the systemic complexity, as if the mystery were too complicated. They advocate no change in pesticide policy. After all, selling poisons to the world’s farmers is profitable.

Furthermore, wild bee habitat shrinks every year as industrial agribusiness converts grasslands and forest into mono-culture farms, which are then contaminated with pesticides. To reverse the world bee decline, we need to fix our dysfunctional and destructive agricultural system."

(Source Greenpeace.org)

What can you do to save the Honey Bee? The Honey Bee Conservancy has several ways to help.

You can reduce or eliminate the amount of pesticides you use. Explore organic ways to grow plants, such as using compost for healthy soil and controlling pests with homemade remedies and bio-controls such as ladybugs.

We asked the Sustainable Souls to create, using this theme as an inspiration point and as a point to share what Save the Honey Bees means to them. I think you will be amazed at how each artist interpreted the theme and how they shared their message.

Let's see how 'Save the Honey Bees' was transformed into art.

(Click names for links to the artist blog post)

Camille McCoy