Honey Bees

Bees are key to enhanced crop pollination and yields. More than 2/3 of our food supply depends on pollinators like honey bees to reach maturity; 1/3 being foods we eat and 1/3 plants that feed food animals like livestock. Commercial farmers readily pay pollination companies to truck-in hundreds of temporary hives during pollination seasons, helping to ensure optimum production.

At Green Meadows, Cobb Master Gardeners are actively working with plants in the Community Garden, the Period House Garden, and the Cherokee Garden, which all benefit from our Honey Bee pollination.

In recent years, we have seen severe nationwide attrition of bee colonies. By some reporting more than half of the hives are being lost. Causes and correction are still unknown. In a recent year we lost four out of five of our Green Meadows hives to parasites. Keeping Cobb bee colonies going is a small, but useful backstop to this loss. We just might have the strain with the key genetic characteristics needed to fix it.