The City of Salmon Arm may not raise a flag for the honey bee, but council certainly supports giving the prodigious pollinators their day.
At last week’s regular city council meeting, Coun. Debbie Cannon recognized a lengthy letter to the city by ‘Day of the Honey Bee’ founder Clinton Ekdahl. In the letter, Ekdahl discusses the importance of the honey bee. He says honey bees, responsible for 70 per cent of our food crop pollination and a third of all the food we eat, continue to die at “alarming and catastrophic rates in Canada and every country where they are raised.” He says there are many explanations pertaining to the bees’ disappearance, the “foremost and most sinister” being irresponsible pesticide use.
To shed some light on the plight of the honey bee, Ekdahl calls on the City of Salmon Arm to proclaim May 29 as the fourth annual Day of the Honey Bee, to write to the B.C. government asking that it endorse a provincewide day of recognition, and to federal government asking it to endorse a National Day of the Honey Bee.
Coun. Debbie Cannon called the letter interesting and said it fits with the city’s pesticide bylaw. And while the City of Salmon Arm has a bylaw prohibiting proclamations, she asked that council support writing a letter supporting a national day of the honey bee.
“I think it’s pretty interesting how much our food chain relies on the honey been to pollinate different things we obviously eat, and their numbers are dropping because of the pesticides we use in the world today,” said Cannon. “So, I’d like to see us support this and maybe we can also send this on to our agricultural committee so they can chat about it a bit too.”
Council backed a letter to support the bees.
