Con Ed and City Growers work together to protect the bee population in New York City, demonstrating a shared commitment to environmental preservation.
https://www.coned.com/en/community-affairs/partnerships
John Rella, a natural resource scientist at Con Edison shares, “City Growers is responsible for maintaining community gardens and educating school children about the importance of pollinators and rooftop gardens.
Becca Di Meo, Executive Director of City Growers shares, “We’re really grateful to Con Edison. ConEd was one of our very first funders.
Con Ed is proactively planting pollinator habitat and fostering a low growth community in the areas under power lines.
The agriculture in NY has to be very innovative, including growing food on the roofs of the city. This helps create a pollinator pathway for bees.
Pollinator Pathways are packets of food, or little pathways throughout an urban landscape to provide food for bees.
Honey bees are not native to the US. They were brought over 400 years ago by European settlers. Honey bees specifically are important because their hives home a large number of pollinators. This can be up to 40,000 honey bees in one hive.
One main focus of City Growers is to help kids understand how bees help us and to help them no be afraid. They teach kids all of the work that bees are doing, how they pollinate, and expose them to bees early on. This can help lessen that fear and open the door to learning about the environment.
Over the past 15 years, bee populations shrank by 62%.
John Rella shares, “The biological world that we’re living in has many issues. It’s being impacted by land use changes, pollution, climate change. Our goals are really to combat that. Biodiversity preservation is the opposite side of the coin of climate change. Because you can’t solve climate change without solving the biodiversity problem that’s been impacting us.”
Learn more about our community partnerships on our website: https://www.coned.com/en/community-affairs/partnerships
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