Helping out our Bee Friends.

I previously blogged about Gardening with kids.  Over the past week and weekend, both of my sons have been in the garden whenever the weather and their mom have permitted them to be.  They are typically digging around looking for worms or seeing how big of a hole that they can dig, but they are also checking their flowers and asking when they get to do some more planting.  They love looking for signs of new plants coming up.  I want to encourage this as much as I can.

The one thing that I am not the biggest fan of in nature are creatures: snakes, spiders, and bees.  Now I solved my snake problem (fear) by moving from North Carolina to Vancouver Island.  NC has poisonous snakes like rattle snakes, copperheads, and so on, while Vancouver Island, garter snakes, which are more like giant worms.  Bees however, are for the most part everywhere.  When I hear the word bee, my first thought is the trauma of getting stung by yellow jackets multiple times as a college student when I was mowing the grass.  It was not the highlight of my summer.  We all have those bad bee or was memories from childhood.  Reality is we need bees.  Bees are pollinators that help to pollinate our gardens to help them grow.  Over the past few summers in our son’s little garden we have had to help with the pollination of some of our squash and pumpkins because they were not cross pollinating.

One of the biggest ways that we can help with saving bees is simply by planting bee friendly plants.  Honey Nut Cheerios has started a #bringbackthebees campaign.  With this campaign you can sign up and get free seeds for your garden.  All you need to do is go online to bringbackthebees.ca (in Canada), fill out their online form which asks for First Name, Last Name, Address, and birthdate, and they will send you a free pack of seeds.

Let’s bee honest, most of you are going to hit the auto fill in option on your phone so it will take less than a minute to do all this.  Click here, and order some free seeds to start your spring/summer garden.  This is a great activity to do with the kids, its easy and all you really need is dirt, a spoon to dig a hole, and water.

You can also get a free children’s book, “Bella and Jack Bring Back The Bees” by author Paulette Bourgeois (the co-creator of Franklin the Turtle) and illustrator Jose Bisaillon. Click herefor more information on how to get your free copy.

For more information about the #BringBackTheBees Campaign and how you can help visit bringbackthebees.ca.