There’s a great summer program that my kids have participated in for several years now, called The Great Sunflower Project. The name is misleading though, because it’s more about bees than sunflowers! The numbers of bees are on the decline, and they’re incredibly important to pollination of our food. Here’s a description from The Great Sunflower site:

“The foods you grow in your home garden and that are grown in gardens around the world help people make ends meet in a healthy, sustainable way. Many plants can’t set fruit until they have been visited by a bee.

We know that some bees have had severe declines which may be affecting food production. No one has ever measured how much pollination is happening over a region, much less a continent so, we don’t know anything about how these declines in bees influence gardens.

Our project is going to use data collected by people like you to produce the first real map of the state of the bees. The only way to do this is to get as many people as possible collecting information from as many places as possible. You can help. Join us! Plant a sunflower! Tell a friend!

We’ve made it easy. Plant a seed or two, spend 15 minutes watching your flowers twice a month and send or input your data. Plant, Watch, Type. That’s it. And, who doesn’t like sunflowers…..”

So in short, you sign up with the project, plant some sunflowers in your yard, and report back with your data of how many bees visit your sunflowers. Counting bees – what a great project for the kids this summer!

About the author: Jennifer Needham, gardening geek and nutrition educator, is an eclectic homeschooling mom to 5 kids. Visit her blog here: Nutrition Education for Healthy Kids

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