There’s nothing like setting a goal and accomplishing it.

Whether the goal is to run an ultra marathon or have a relaxing day on the couch, setting and reaching goals is an important part of feeling good.

In fact, regularly setting and accomplishing goals physically changes your brain (in a good way, of course 😉). Remember our article on video games? Similar processes are responsible for these changes. 

We’ll talk a lot in the future about goals behind the Blue Door, but today we’re gonna talk about bees. We really like to keep you on your toes. 

We could list off amazing bee facts for a week straight (look out for a possible bee week in 2020 😎) but let’s look at a few facts.

Bees are pollinators, which means they transfer pollen between female and male plants. This allows the plants to seed, fruit and grow. Bees are responsible for one in every three bites of food we take. 

For the last 30 years, bee populations have been in a pretty serious decline.

It’s pretty hard to gauge populations of wild bees because they don’t really… stay in one place very long.

But, we do know that our commercial honeybee populations in the US have declined about 40%. This decline is mostly due to one major problem; our agricultural industry. Mainly, the use of insecticides and pesticides. Habitat destruction for crop planting is another huge issue for the bees.

We obviously can’t stop growing our food. Even though there are shifts occurring in the agricultural industry, we need to be a little more creative and, quite frankly, aggressive if we aim to save our bee populations and in turn, ourselves. So, how can we help?

A group of excellent humans got together in 2015 and formed the National Pollinator Garden Network.

The goal was to establish a network of chemical-free pollinator gardens across North America. One million pollinator gardens, to be exact.

You probably guessed this by now but they accomplished that goal. And then some. Today the network stands strong with over 1,040,0000 pollinator gardens, about 5 million acres, across the US, Mexico, and Canada. 

These gardens give bees and other pollinators like bats, butterflies, beetles, and hummingbirds safe habitat to carry on their life’s work.

The humans involved get the benefits of accomplishing their goals and being a part of a community, both things that are proven to have huge benefits. And Blue Door gets to spread the word. 

There are other ways that we can all help the bees, including one that ties right in with our citizen science article. But, that is a story for another day. 

Keep Buzzin’.