Gary Woodard of Woodard Bee Farm reminds people the importance of honeybees and other pollinators to society and encourages making intentional choices to protect pollinators.

He reminds readers that without the honeybee, much of the food on the shelves of grocery stores would be unavailable.

“A large percentage of the food that you eat is there because it was pollinated, and the honeybee is one of the major pollinators in the U.S,” said Woodard. “Many commercial beekeepers are running hundreds and sometimes thousands of hives that they will load up on a truck and move to mass farms just to pollinate their crops because there are not that many bees in those areas. A lot of the places don’t have trees in the wild with nesting bees.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, honeybees pollinate 80 percent of all flowering plants. This includes more than 130 types of fruits and vegetables.

He explained how commercial beekeepers operate in areas with lesser natural occurrences of bees.

“They’ll bring in semi-truck loads of bees and station those in groves and help pollinate. After the Bloom is gone, they’ll pick up the bees and move to the next thing that needs bees,” said Woodard. “That’s what the big commercial beekeepers do. That’s how your food is. Basically, where a bloom is, is where a piece of fruit is going to be. and when that’s pollinated then the fruit can come about, and you have something to eat.”

The loss of pollinators such as the honeybee is due to a number of causes, including dwindling habitats caused by city growth and expansion, diseases and parasites caused by climate change and other intense environmental changes, and environmental contaminants such as insecticides.

Insecticides, chemical agents that destroy one or more species of insects, are detrimental to the pollinator community.

Woodard encourages farmers and others to steer clear of using insecticides for pest control.

“So, everybody gets really excited when you know people talk about the bee may go away if we don’t do something to help protect it. So, on our farm, we don’t use insecticides, but I know farmers around the area who do, and I can’t stop that,” said Woodard. “I can only encourage people not to use those kinds of things. You just hope that they come to a common knowledge and common understanding of what it’s doing to the insects.”

Private landowners and farmers can protect pollinators through sustainable agricultural practices. These practices encourage a healthy habitat for wildlife where the farmer and the wildlife can coexist together in a mutually beneficial way.

Woodard went on to say, “use more natural sources to control insects. If a honeybee can get to it, if you use something that attracts the honeybee to a bloom and that bloom has been sprayed with some kind of insecticide, it will likely damage or kill the bee.”

Other than avoiding insecticides, farmers can practice rest-rotation grazing and other grazing practices that produce better habitats for native pollinators.

Landowners can opt for native plants that are found naturally in the area and local ecosystem. Using pure native seed types versus turf lawn or non-native grasses produces a healthier natural habitat for local pollinators.

A native lawn, once established, requires less maintenance compared to turf or non-native lawns creating a mutually beneficial relationship for the landowner and the local pollinators.

Woodard hopes all residents will do what they can to protect Limestone County’s friendly neighborhood pollinators.

“It’s raising awareness, people need to think about what they’re doing,” said Woodard. “Just remember, if you think there’s no bees around your place, that’s probably true in a lot of cases like inside the city, but there are some beekeepers here in Athens, and a lot of people don’t know that and bees fly up to five miles. So, bees are flying in from outside of Athens and there’s also bees inside of Athens that are being kept.”