Mission Main Street Grant
From this distant vantage point, the honeybee might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that simple bee. That’s your food. That’s your sustenance. From it everyone you love, everyone you have ever known has fed from it’s services. The aggregate of a 40 day life span may only be one-twelfth a teaspoon of honey, but that little bit of honey took 45,000 flowers to produce. Most of those flowers put food on your table. 80% of your food, in fact, is reliant on honeybees. On those two pairs of wings bears the weight of humanity as we know it.
There are 1,000 bees in this picture. The average commercial apiary has 12,000,000 bees in their care. If one bee in 1,000 seems like an insignificant brown dot, how significant can it be out of millions? Where has that one bee been? Does it carry Verroa destructor, or tracheal mites back to it’s colony? To stop the progression of colony collapse disorder we must stop thinking in billions, and think of the one bee.
Sweet Mountain Farm believes in that single bee. We take every care to ensure healthy bees. Our farm is on an island, far from important shipping routes, we do not feed our bees processed sugar, we do not use pesticides, we do not use antibiotics, we use northern white cedar hives that have not been treated with potentially toxic chemicals. We may not be able to keep that one bee completely free of disease, but we make every effort we can. So far our progress has been amazing. Our die-off from pests and disease is significantly below industry average. Our hives are almost completely void of Verroa destructor. Our hives are producing lots of honey, and we continue to grow.
We are sending this card out to ask for your help. Chase is offering a $150,000 grant to support small businesses. We think that raising healthy, disease resistant bees is a noble endeavor. Chase grant would go a long way to our success. We also think Chase’s Main Street Mission — is a lot like our single bee mission. Our farm is like that single bee in the hive. Please show your support for that single bee by voting for us at: https://www.missionmainstreetgrants.com/business/detail/53565
Voting is now closed. We made it to the next round with 335 votes.
