Bees are in trouble. A big part of the solution couldn't be easier or more delightful.
What's good for them is good for you.
Q: What do you give a sick bee?
A: Flowers!
Seriously, flowers are the answer. Here's the full story.
You've probably heard about mysteriously disappearing bees and colony collapse disorder. It's true: Bee numbers have dropped at horrifying rates.
This matters. We depend on bees for a third of our food. We can thank honeybees for pollinating cherries, blueberries, pears, strawberries, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, and apples just for starters. And they also pollinate alfalfa — OK, that's not tasty, but it does feed a lot of animals that are pretty tasty. Tomatoes are pollinated by bumblebees, and their numbers are down too.
Professor Marla Spivak calls this the "big bee bummer."
But she also sees a solution.
For one thing, it really helps to know that bees have great health care.
Honeybee societies work in mysterious ways, with no leader, but 40,000 to 50,000 individuals collectively making decisions and communicating about important bee things, like where the flowers are. Care-taking bees collect resins from plants that they bring back to the hive that are a natural antibiotic (propolis). Propolis fights bacteria and fungus and boosts the health of the hive. So with a little help, bees are very capable of taking care of themselves. In fact, they've been doing just that for some 100 million years.
Another key piece of the picture is that it's not just one thing that's killing 'em. It's a combination:
- Endless, flowerless landscapes — they're food deserts for bees
- Natural bee diseases and pests like the varroa mite — they're like giant ticks
- Pesticides
Where's lunch?
Spivak describes how all these things might come together if you were a bee. It's not only the giant blood-sucking mite on your leg or just that you have to go miles to find any joint with nutritious food. It's that also in your weakened state, if that food has even a small dose of a chemical that makes your head kinda fuzzy, you might forget where you are.
"Oh, just where did I leave that hive?"
A lot of bees just never come home. No one knows exactly what happens to them.
But here's Spivak's delightful solution.
1. Plant flowers.
Even just a window box is a wonderful thing. There are lots of bees in the city. If you rip up a whole lawn and replant it with flowers, so much the better! Go native. You'll get butterflies and maybe hummingbirds too. Be sure to purchase your plants from a source that's pesticide-free.
2. Don't spray pesticides. Just don't do it.
It's that easy.
Here's Spivak's fascinating talk. Send a friend this video (and some flower seeds) and spread the word.
UPDATE: Since Spivak gave this talk, the U.S. EPA has put a moratorium on the use of neonics, the class of pesticides she describes. Some places have banned them. There's even published scientific evidence that pollen from plants treated with neonics are actually preferred by bees. The scientists suggest that the bees get hooked on the nicotine, just like humans can. Some people are skeptical. But while the scientists, farmers, and pesticide companies are duking it out, we have plenty of reasons already to push for diversity in agriculture and to do all we can to support a healthy, flower-filled landscape full of bees.
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
Gif of baby being baptized
Woman gives toddler a bath Canva
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.