Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/375622
Winter Fancy Food Show Booth 1553 being overtaken by corn and soybeans, cash crops that don't require pollinators. "We need to convince farmers that bees are important in general even if they're not directly related to the crops they're producing," Evans says. "The Midwest was traditionally a good place for bees to make honey during the summer, but we've been losing them over the past 10 years." No one solution will resolve the bee crisis, but a number of efforts are aiming to chip away at the problem. Urban beehives and community outreach. An outgrowth of the Bee Lab is the Bee Squad, a group that manages urban beehives in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Customers buy the honey at season's end. Becky Masterman, the Bee Squad coordinator since 2012, praises the public for embracing the cause. "We call them bee supporters—people who don't want to keep bees but want to help bees," she says. "A growing class of people are becoming educated about gardening and landscap- ing, having conversations and really mak- ing a difference with what's going on with the bees. Their friends and customers ask questions and then more people come on board." Last year the Bee Squad managed 46 urban colonies. Over the winter it lost 17 percent of new colonies and 25 percent of established colonies, which was a much lower rate than the rest of the state. This year the Bee Squad is managing more than 100 colonies, in places rang- ing from the rooftop of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to the W at the Foshay Tower. Aveda's corporate headquarters is home to a humming beehive. So are two local golf courses. "People associate golf courses as unfriendly to bees, but almost every single time I'm there golfers will wave to me and ask how the bees are doing," Masterman says. "They're very engaged. These interactions have helped spread the word and get them invested, then they bring it home to their own landscaping practices and employees. A lot of people out there want to help." Masterman stresses education is essen- tial. "The way to ultimately solve this prob- lem is not to have more beekeepers, not put- ting more colonies out there," she explains. "What's killing the bees is lack of food and pesticides contaminating that food, the varroa mite, and disease. But if you ban a whole class of insecticides, what comes next? Would there be something worse?" FALL 2014 31