We Celebrate World Honeybee Day
The third Saturday in August, August 16, 2025, marks World Honeybee Day, a global celebration of one of the planet’s most important pollinators. Honeybees play a vital role in our ecosystem and food systems, supporting biodiversity and helping produce over one-third of the food we eat. This day is an opportunity to appreciate their essential contributions, and to recognize how we can help protect them.
At the UCC Library, we believe that understanding the natural world is a key part of education, sustainability, and collective well-being. World Honeybee Day invites us to pause and ask: How do our actions impact the world around us? How can we support ecological health and balance? To support this reflection, the Sue Shaffer Learning Commons and Library offers a wide range of digital and streaming resources focused on bees, pollination, environmental sustainability, and conservation.
Books and eBooks:
Explore titles like The Bees in Your Backyard by Joseph S. Wilson and Olivia Messinger Carril, a beautifully illustrated guide that helps readers identify native bees and understand their behavior and habitat. Our Native Bees: North America's endangered pollinators and the fight to save them by Paige Embry, highlights the vital yet often overlooked role of North America's native bees in ecosystems and agriculture, as the author explores their importance through personal adventures and conservation efforts. And for those interested in beekeeping, The Backyard Beekeeper by Kim Flottum offers an accessible introduction to starting and maintaining a hive.
MasterFILE Premier:
Browse scholarly articles on Bee Vision to explore how bees perceive the world. You can read this study that shows that Bees teach each other puzzle solving, highlighting their intelligence. The article Honey Bees in Demand discusses how farmers and beekeepers can collaborate to support bee health while meeting agricultural needs. Research topics such as the impact of pesticides on bee health, climate change, and urban beekeeping as a form of conservation.
Films on Demand:
Watch Vanishing of the Bees, a documentary that examines the mysterious decline of honeybee populations around the world and explores the consequences for food security and environmental health. Another featured film, Hive to Honey, shows Award-winning Colorado apiary Bee squared, led by owner Beth, a behind the scenes look at local honey production while highlighting the vital role of bees and how we can help protect their future.
Kanopy:
This platform offers several compelling documentaries on pollinators and conservation. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us? presents a poetic, urgent look at the global bee crisis and the people working to heal it. Seed: The Untold Story also highlights the connection between pollinators and food security, emphasizing the importance of biodiversity and indigenous farming practices.
Gale OneFile: Environmental Studies and Policy:
Find timely articles on environmental policy, agriculture, and bee conservation. Notable reads include: Land Use and Season Interactively Affect Honeybee (Apis mellifera) Body Size and Fat Stores. which talks about human driven habitat changes impact honeybee health, with this study showing seasonal and land use effects on their size, fat stores, and survival traits. If you are a coffee drinker, Tropical agriculture: the value of bees to coffee harvest might interest you. This article explores how honeybees significantly boost coffee yields and highlights the importance of pollinator friendly habitats for sustainable tropical agriculture.
Protecting Our Pollinators, One Day and Every Day
World Honeybee Day is more than a tribute to bees, it’s a call to stewardship, inviting us to learn more about how we can support the environment, both locally and globally. At UCC, we are committed to fostering an informed and engaged community that values sustainability, science, and the delicate balance of nature.
Whether you're curious about pollination, concerned about climate change, or considering planting a bee-friendly garden, the UCC Library is here to support your learning with resources that inform and inspire.
Take a moment this August, and every day, to appreciate the tiny workers that keep our planet blooming. Because when we care for bees, we care for the future.
Deep Thoughts and Documentaries
Join us this Thursday (August 21) from 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM in the Library, as we watch and reflect on Wild Honey: Caring for Bees in a Divided Land as well as the film Days and Years in the Lives of Plants. These films are available via one of our streaming services Kanopy.
Pro tip: Did you know that if you pre-register for these events then you will automatically get a calendar invitation & 1-hr reminder? you can do so by using this link.
About the Films
Wild Honey: Caring for Bees in a Divided Land: This Film explores how migratory wild honeybees transcend the colonial border dividing Timor, uniting the people of Lookeu through ritual, song, and shared heritage. Amid modern pressures, the community works to preserve the bees' movements and their cultural identity.
Days and Years in the Lives of Plants: A Look at how plants time their flowering using light-sensitive pigments, messenger, RNA and temperature cues, and how these processes are impacted by climate change.
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