Webinar: Towards Resilient Bees in a Time of Climate Emergency

Climate Change, more accurately labelled Climate Emergency, is already having a profound effect world wide on both honey bee and native bee populations. Our reliance on bees as pollinators of many food crops, and their position as keystone species in ecological pyramids, requires that we respond with our best efforts to support them. This presentation does not promise to fix the problem but to identify some of the major, and some of the subtler, ways in which Climate Change is creating havoc for bees and to propose some first steps in mitigation using best practices from organic, ecological, biodynamic and permaculure approaches.

Fran Freeman: Fran studied Apiculture and Sustainable Urban Agriculutre at University of Guelph, has taken numerous beekeeping workshops, and completed her Permaculture Design certificate ten years ago. She has managed or co-managed a number of small scale apiaries using organic/ecological practices in a variety of rural and urban settings since 2005. Currently, She runs bee yards at two Humber College campuses as well as the Humber Arboretum, all in Toronto. She developed and teaches a 45-hour Sustainable Urban Beekeeping course at the Centre for Urban Ecology at Humber. She is a returning speaker at GOC. Additional speaking engagements include: Apimondia International Congress (Montreal, 2019), the Eastern Apicultural Society Conference (Guelph, 2015), the Green Living Show (Toronto, 2015) and the Urban Agriculture Summer School (UQAM, Montreal, 2014).