Hilary Kearney, Founder of Girl Next Door Honey, joined Closing Bell to discuss her partnership with Comvita to save the important pollinators, as bee colonies are on the decline across the United States.

Closing Bell

Bee Expert Partners With Comvita Honey to Save 10 Million Bees

and long thought of as an annoying pest turns out bees are in fact the opposite. There are essential pollinators that nourish the environment and the world around them and humans want to get very far we would not without them. Well now in the face of climate change, their importance is coming even more into focus and there has been a 50% decline in us bee colonies in the past few years, prompting new collaborations between experts and environmentalists to save the beats. Our next guest is helping those efforts in a big way. Joining me now is Hillary Carney, founder of Girl Next Door Honey and a com vida ambassador. Um it's great to have you on the show. Talk to me more about this partnership and what you're aiming to accomplish. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so we're teaming up right now. Cong Vida is teaming up with beekeepers all across the country to rescue 10 million bees. Um so we're all going out into our our communities and we're looking for people who have wild bee colonies that need a place to live. So in the spring a lot of times they swarm and sometimes they go too inconvenient places like your mailbox or maybe inside the wall of your house. It is amazing. And it's not far from the work that you're doing of course with your own company here, Girl next door Honey as the founder of that company. Hillary, what's your main goal? My mangles, definitely education. You know, I really love it when I get to work with like for a group of kids, they might start out being like you bees and then by the end they're like bees, You know, so my whole goal is to get people to realize how cute they are. They have heart shaped faces, you know, they're fuzzy, they help the environment, they help make food for us and they're very smart and very cool. Um They can tell time and all sorts of cool stuff. Mhm. Now I know your work up until this point is really kind of focused on saving the bees. Talk to me about your projects, your recent projects and the success of them. Yeah. So right now we're just doing a lot of the rescues with Con vida, which is a really great Manuka honey company and we make honey as well. Um It's not the same as Manuka honey, but it is really nice to get some local honey. Um And then I'm also I have some games that I've created. I've written some books and I use those as teaching materials. I really just go out into the community and do classes and I do experiences where I suit people up into bee suits and take them into the hive. Very cool. Sounds like a good like day trip or maybe a field trip. Hillary. I like that. Well, speaking of some of these statistics here, I see 70 of the top 100 human food crops. They're actually pollinated by bees. Just how important Arby's to our overall ecosystem. Yeah, I mean, well they say that one in every three bites of food that you eat was pollinated by B um But we tend to focus on the food, but we don't think of the bigger picture, 80% of the plants on earth need some kind of pollination to happen in order for them to reproduce. So when we think about it that way, bees and other pollinators are really holding up the entire ecosystem. Imagine our planet not having 80% of the plants that it currently has. And some people think, you know, I don't really like fruits or vegetables, but they're also doing things like pollinating alfalfa, which is what we feed our cows. So if you like ice cream and hamburgers, bees are actually making that happen as well. So they're kind of holding up the entire ecosystem that we exist in. Got to give it up for the bees. My final question. Hillary due to timing is what's behind the decline that we've seen in bee populations. Do we know what's behind that? I don't think we know exactly. There's multiple factors coming into play and they kind of pile up on top of each other and then it changes by region, but definitely having this unpredictable climate with more extreme weather. Things are bad for bees. They don't like wildfires, they don't like flooding. Um They dont like hurricanes like we do either. So all the things that are impacting us with the climate are affecting the beast. Plus there's a lack of habitat, a lack of good forage. So I always tell people to plant flowering trees. Today is world Bee Day. It's a good day to go out and plant a B. Tree. Alright, we're gonna remember that. Thanks again to Hillary Carney, founder of Girl Next door Honey and a convent ambassador. Hillary thanks so much.