Today, we're talking bees. Yep. Those bees. Sure, some people might have had a bad encounter or two with the wrong end of a bee's stinger, and might be on guard around the little insects. For the most part though, bees get a bad rap. In addition to creating delicious honey, they also help pollinate crops. Without their help we wouldn't have food.
The program is a mix of government funded green roofs and private gardens, and is hailed as the first such highway in existence. Bees, like most animals on Earth, like to move around, but when their habitat is fractured into tiny areas of flowering plants broken up by concrete or grass, it can be difficult for them to move from one habitat to the next. By creating a network of flowering habitats (or a 'highway') the hope is that the bees will be able to move freely, without being unduly stressed.
The three goals are:
- Reduce honey bee colony losses to economically sustainable levels;
- Increase monarch butterfly numbers to protect the annual migration; and
- Restore or enhance millions of acres of land for pollinators through combined public and private action.
Could the United States have a bee superhighway in our future? It certainly seems possible given the last of the goals. In the meantime, we're going to keep an eye on the development of robo-bees (still in the very early stages), which could help fill in the pollinator gap while the bee colonies recover.