The Boulevard Senior Living Recognizes the Importance Bees Play on Our Ecosystem

Don’t step on a Bee! Sounds like sane advice, but did you know it’s also a day of recognizing the incredible impact that bees play on our ecosystem? There are roughly 4,000 bee species in North America and about 20,000 around the globe that pollinate everything from flowers to vegetables. In fact, bees pollinate approximately one in every three bites of food you eat, which makes them essential to the health and prosperity of countless ecosystems worldwide. Crops such as apples, cranberries, and broccoli all rely on bees. Fruits like blueberries and cherries are 90% dependent on honeybee pollination, as are almonds. To pollinate the roughly 1.2 million acres of almond trees, the California almond industry needs about 1.8 million bees.

However, one in four species of bees are facing extinction. From fungus to pesticides, bees are facing rapidly declining numbers. In the US, the honeybee population has declined 60% since 1947.

This year, The Boulevard Senior Living – Wentzville is celebrating “Don’t Step On A Bee Day” by utilizing locally sourced mango, oranges, cumin, garlic, cantaloupe, honeydew, pineapple, zucchini, yellow squash, cherry tomatoes, green onions, garlic scrapes, fava bean, tomatoes, poblanos, black beans, chocolate, vanilla seed pods, and raspberries.

The dishes I will be making for our July 10th tribute will be mango mojo marinated chicken with melon salsa, roasted summer vegetables and charred fava beans with fire-roasted tomatoes, and poblanos for the entrée. For dessert, I’ll feature black bean and chocolate chunk brownies with raspberries.

Could you imagine Halloween without pumpkins or Thanksgiving without cranberries? Our world would be a lot less colorful and flavorful without pollinators and the hard work that they do every day to keep the food supply going, $19 billion worth of crop productions annually. Native bees help maintain plant communities that provide food and shelter to about twenty-five percent of birds and many mammals from grizzly bears to squirrels. After spending seven years as the Executive Chef of the Saint Louis Zoo and developing menus for exclusive pollinator dinners I realized there is a lot more involved in bee pollination than honey. By recognizing this holiday, we hope to bring awareness to this global issue and try to start a conversation about what we can all do to help reverse this trend and help build the bee