Efforts to reverse the decline in bee numbers in Buncrana will be celebrated in a new TV documentary this month.
Plean Bee will air on World Bee Day on May 20th. Projects in Derry and Buncrana feature heavily in the film in relation to the All Ireland Pollinator Plan (AIPP).
In Plean Bee, viewers will learn of the variety of pollinators who work on our behalf, the honeybees, the bumblebees as well as Ireland’s 77 species of solitary bee. While bees are responsible for most pollination, there are also wasps, moths and butterflies and hoverflies to take into account.
The Buncrana Tidy Towns team and the town gardeners are part of the pollinator success story. Buncrana won the best town for supporting pollinators in the 2020 Tidy Towns category thanks to the community’s work in transforming how the town plants flowers and maintains its roundabouts and parkland to the advantage of bees and pollinators.
Buncrana Pollinator Signage
The aim of the AIPP was to encourage as much of Irish society as possible to take action to protect or develop habitats and food sources. The AIPP published action plans for every type of citizen activist, and in Plean Bee we witness how Derry City and Strabane Council have reduced the mowing of grass over the summer, to allow wildflowers to grow to support pollinators.
Dr. Christine Doherty, the Biodiversity Officer for the Derry and Strabane District Council, has been really driving the new approach to support pollinators – less pesticides, better flower varieties, leaving verges and meadows to grow wildflowers etc. The good news is that it’s making a difference, so it’s a rare example of an environmental strategy that’s working.
Christine Doherty, the Biodiversity Officer for the D&SDC
The success of the pollinator plan, and the huge community buy-in involved means that other countries, and the EU in particular, are looking to Ireland for help in improving the situation of their own pollinators. The AIPP is making a difference, and as plan co-founder Úna Fitzpatrick states, ‘the beauty about it is that we’re not asking ‘anybody’ to solve this problem, we’re asking ‘everybody’ to get involved, and if everybody took small actions, then together we would solve it.’
Plean Bee: the radical plan reversing the decline of bees and pollinators across all of Ireland – 20ú Bealtaine 2021 ar TG4 9.30pm / 20th May 2021 on TG4 9.30pm
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