The end is near! For this blog series.
Over the last six weeks, we have delved deep into the inner mindset that drives Urban Bee Project Australia. We hope that you have found it interesting so far and are looking forward to the conclusion.
If you are starting to read our blog for the first time, this particular blog is the conclusion of a three-part story. We recommend heading back to part one of "What do we do?" and filling in the gaps before continuing.
This is where the tale ends for this blog. We have outlined our goals and how we plan to achieve them. "What were they again?" I hear you ask. Well, let us refresh our memories then:
Increase beehive numbers, bee population & health in the fast-growing urban environment of our cities.
Help to educate local communities on the importance of bees and how to deal with them.
Encourage others to take an interest in Beekeeping.
Improve the local environment for our bees.
Educate and promote actions that reduce our impact on our local environment.
Go Local.
Part one and two discussed the first four of our goals, and now we can provide you with the thrilling conclusion of the final two. Let's begin.
Educate and promote actions that reduce our impact on our local environment.
The internet and the world around us are awash with conflicting information about our environment. Depending on who owns the TV channel you tune into for the news, which newspaper you read, and what opinions you see on Facebook, you can pretty much guarantee that the information you are getting has been cherry-picked or in some way manipulated to either appeal to our bias inclinations or drive us to a predetermined conclusion.
This is not new news. People, groups and organisations have been using the media to get people on their side since the idea of media began. In some cases, it can be used to help people by educating them about the facts of a situation, think of public safety announcements, but this is not always the case.
Unfortunately, with the rise of private media and the fact that most news outlets are trying to sell advertising space, some information is cherry-picked or manipulated to appeal to a market that advertisers want. The internet, although free for anyone to use and unregulated, which means many people can broadcast fact and truth freely, also suffers from the very thing that makes it great. Anyone can talk about any subject, whether they are experts in the field or not, qualified or not, or have an agenda or not. Many who go to the internet for answers end up stumbling across conspiracy theories and groups who try to convince them to follow their following. Unfortunately, many of these groups are faceless, unqualified, are not fact-checked and are not accountable for the results of their efforts.
It has led to some sad consequence, and it has left no one responsible but the person who has fallen into the trap in the first place. We used to have a word for this kind of information - Propaganda. In the past five years, we have felt the need to re-brand this word into something a little less aggressive — fake news.
Propaganda (Fake-News) is everywhere these days.
Whatever you want to call it, it still has the same effect on our community. Nowhere has this been felt more than on our opinion of the environment.
Our goal is to provide people with factual, scientific information that explains our impact on the environment and what we can start doing to reduce that impact.
How will we do this?
Simple, as time goes on, and we continue to write our blogs, we will also include blogs covering environmental news and information. We will research a given topic and explain it in simple terms so that everyone can understand it. Additionally, we will provide all our sources to you with every blog that tackles scientific environmental topics so that you can see the information yourself and hold us to account.
We also hope to create short and easy to follow videos that will explain some of our environmental challenges and how we can make small changes to help combat them. These will be published on our YouTube channel, which is currently under construction.
We hope that this will help our community understand its environment better and make better decisions based on facts rather than rhetoric from special interest groups. We will let our publishing history and your investigation be the judge of how well we achieve this.
We hope that small steps like this will slowly help those who want to know the truth find out the real impact they have on the environment.
On to our final goal.
Go Local.
Now that's a phrase that is thrown around a lot these days. Lots of people, companies and celebrities love jumping onto that bandwagon to talk about going local. Many of these same people and companies are still happy to head down to the supermarket and buy an apple, banana or tomato that has been shipped in from the other side of the world instead of driving down to the local farmer's markets.
All our Honey comes from our Local hives and is sourced ethically. Always putting the bees first.
Oh, and it gets better. Some do make the effort of going down to the local farmers market, only to find out that half the stalls are just fronts for large importers trying to masquerade as farmers.
Food is one thing. What about everything else we need to get by from day to day. Clothes are often made on the other side of the world and by people who earn a minimal share of the product value. Even companies that say they are ethical fall far short of how we expect workers to be treated.
So what can we do about it?
Urban Bee Project Australia intends to help people make informed decisions and provide them with a real local alternative wherever possible. It may take a little time to get this all set up, but trust us, it will be worth the wait.
Firstly and currently, we offer to sell our local Honey, produced in local hives to the public. We hope to have a few more products coming soon to add to your options. The Honey is ethically sourced to put the bees first. We sell it locally and don't ship it across the country, which means it is always fresh. We will even tell you which hive it came from, so you know how new and local it is.
That is phase one and is currently underway. Phase two sees us starting a clothing brand, ethically and locally produced. We are currently working hard to get this up and running, working on designs and looking for local suppliers and manufacturers to make it happen. So watch this space.
We hope to have the clothing brand available as soon as possible. We just want to make it happen the right way.
The profits made from these sales go right back into Urban Bee Project Australia and its resolve to bring nature back to the city. As we grow, we will improve our local offerings too, giving you even more options to help you stay local. So when we are up and running, go ahead and support us!
So over the last few weeks, we have broken down our plans and goals at Urban Bee Project Australia. We have talked about our goal to help increase the number of urban beehives in our cities and how we will use our Bee Host program to get there. We will educate our communities about the importance of our bees through our blogs, soon to come YouTube channel and future training days.
We will encourage others to take up the challenge of Urban Beekeeping through our blogs, training and Bee Host program as well as giving them video tours of our Hives. And for those that want to make their local area more bee-friendly, we will soon have information on bee-friendly gardens and with your support a tree planting program.
And as we have discussed in this blog, our plans to help everyone understand their impact on the environment and how they can better go local are already underway.
So hopefully now you have a clearer picture of what we do and how we plan on achieving our goals. We hope that you have enjoyed reading about us and are as excited about what we do as we are. If you found it annoying, hopefully, our next one will be more interesting for you.
Leave us some feedback about our blogs, or if there is a topic you're interested in or want us to discuss, let us know in the comments section. And by getting your friends to like and follow us on Social Media, you're helping us grow and achieve. Get them on-board.
And don't forget, while you wait for our next blog, you can go through our older ones and check out the rest of our website.
Until our next blog, make friends with a bee. Maybe share an orange with it. Everyone likes oranges.
