Honey Bee Haven For Free Ice Cream!

I never knew that during the winter the bees do not hibernate, instead they keep each other warm by huddling up and switching place every so often. You know this reminds me of what penguins do when it gets super cold. They all huddle up and switch positions so that every penguin can have a chance in the middle ( warmest part). Any ways just thought that was interesting. Oh and I never realized how many bees a single queen bee could give birth to! It said nearly two thousand on one day. Thats so much...

I enjoy Alice's writing style. Her beginning paragraph was so catchy, especially when she starting talking to the busy bees. Her essay was like an informative story. She makes her essay fun to read but also informs the readers about the life of the honey bees. After reading this I actually know what it means to be a busy bee.

Okay so reading her essay reminded me of this article i read in December at the Davis Enterprise. Im not quite sure who wrote it buy they said "Haagen-Dazs has announced a $125,000 donation to the UC Davis department of entomology to launch a nationwide design competition to create a half-acre Honey Bee Haven garden at UC Davis." Plus the winner gets free ice cream for one year!

So you are probably wondering why Haagen Dazs would do this? Well it turns out that the honey bees are dying :( They are dying from "colony collapse disorder", which is basically hive abandonment. As I read further into the article I found out that the honey bees are disappearing due to pesticides, parasites, stress, and climate change. Since Haagen Dazs depends on the work of honeybees for their ice cream ( practically half of their flavors) they decided to grant UCD the privilege of building a honey bee garden. So UCD created a contest for the public to submit their garden designs.

I believe around March the winner was anounced which was a team located in Sausalito. Their design is going to be used to build a half acre garden to save the honey bees ...yay!!! And I think the actual project will be starting around October. UC Davis had a website to look at all the designs submitted but they took it down unfortuantely. It would be interesting to see what the acutaly design turns out to look like in October.

I know this whole Haagen Dazs competition does not have much to do with the reading, but whenever honey bees are brought up I always think about their circumstance right now and how companies are affected by it. And too no surprise Haagan Dazs is affected greatly by the bee shortage.