The Bee Conservancy
History and Mission
The Honeybee Conservancy was founded in 2009 by Guillermo Fernandez in response to the news that bees across the globe were in crisis. In fall of 2020, The Honeybee Conservancy relaunched as The Bee Conservancy to better capture our work protecting all bees and securing environmental and food justice through education, research, habitat creation, and advocacy.
As a child immigrant from Cuba, Guillermo grew up in a crowded, multi-ethnic urban area where one-third of the community lived in poverty. His neighborhood, like so many others, was a food desert; fresh fruit and vegetables were near impossible to find, supermarkets stocked mostly processed food, and local restaurants were all fast food chains. There was little-to-no green space, just concrete as far as the eye could see, and the community suffered from rampant health issues that were the result of poor nutrition and degraded environment.
Decades later, Guillermo started The Honeybee Conservancy for two reasons. First, he wanted to help save the bees, who pollinate 1 in 3 bites of food we eat and are vital to healthy ecology. Second, he hoped to find ways to empower underserved communities like the one he grew up in to produce healthy food and build green spaces.
Our initiatives, such as our flagship program Sponsor-a-Hive, have served hundreds of thousands of people across the United States, and protected an estimated 10 million bees to date.
Unfortunately, that’s the shocking future we face if we don’t work to help our most precious pollinator: bees. Far from being a niche concern, bees lie at the heart of our survival – and they have been dying at unprecedented rates. Their hard work is not only essential to healthy ecosystems, but to sustaining animal and human life too.
Each year, bees are experiencing massive die-offs throughout the U.S. and Canada. In 2017, the rusty patched bumblebee was the first bee added to the endangered species list in the continental U.S. A 2019 survey from the Bee Informed Partnership states that nearly 40% of U.S. beekeepers lost their colonies during the previous year. Compared to 1947, the U.S. honeybee population has declined by 60%.
Bees pollinate one-third of the food we eat.
From apples and squash to buckwheat and coffee, bees are responsible for pollinating most of the fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts that are essential to our diets. Honeybees in particular play a huge role in agriculture, contributing over $15 billion to the value of US crop production.
Their vision aligns with ours at Green Translations, that it is only through genuine and passionate efforts can we transform awareness to tangible action. In nature, nothing takes more than what it needs. If it does, it goes back to nature. The greatest spiritual leaders believed that love was a force to heal people from illnesses to save our world. That it is in our hands, the inhabitants of our blue Earth, to educate one another, act without hesitation, as well as urge our leaders towards radical steps given the time we have left. We can set aside our differences, self-centered interests and come together against our common foe, which is the destruction of everything we hold dear. It is no longer just an inconvenient truth, it has become our reality; our battle ground, the nexus where we must unite and ultimately decide, whether to stand divided as we face our own oblivion or as one unyielding force to fight for the only planet we have.