Low Carbon Cookbook at the Bungay Beehive Day - 15 July

At the recent Bee Cause meeting in Norwich, organised by Friends of the Earth, Bob Flowerdew declared: if you want to help bees eat organic food, don't give your money to the pharmaceutical companies. It's perhaps the most useful step you can take to help both honeybees and wild bees in their present decline. Protecting wild places and growing nectar and pollen plants your garden are great helps, but the main damage caused to pollinator populations is the high use of pesticides in commercial food production.

At the Low Carbon Cookbook we're organic to the max: recognising that it's not just eating for our own health and well-being that is important, but that by "voting with our forks" and eating plants grown without systemic insecticides we're also backing the millions of creatures who suffer colony and habitat loss as a result of industrial farming. 90% of our crop species depend on pollination and we face a tasteless and depressing food future, if the bees and other insects disappear.

At our next meeting we are converging for a picnic after the (Sustainable) Bungay Beehive Day, organised by the Transition group, Bungay Community Bees. We will be discussing the crucial relationship between bees and our food, and everyone is welcome to join us. Just bring a picnic dish and/or drink with you and a rug to sit on.

This is BCB's second annual day of talks, walks and workshops celebrating the honeybee, and this year will feature the film, Queen of the Sun, and a talk by Heidi Hermann from the Natural Beekeeping Trust. At 12.15 LCC's Mark Watson will be leading a Bee and Flower walk around Bungay's diverse green spaces and at 2pm Charlotte Du Cann will be discussing wild flowers and their relationship with bees, with excerpts from her new book 52 Flowers That Shook My World – A Radical Return to Earth. Full details of the day here.

Meet at the entrance to the Festival marquee, Castle Meadow, Bungay on 15 July at 5pm. For further info contact Charlotte Du Cann theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk

Images from BCB trip to High Ash Farm, Caister St Edmund, farmed by Chris Skinner for the benefit of wild plants and creatures (and us).