Beekeeping for All 03 / If the government won't do it, we will! Young people raise bees to build their own "bee ecological reserve"
In the morning, bright sunlight fell on a mountainside in Taiping, Taichung. In front of a wooden gate that allowed only one vehicle to pass at a time, a line of small cars had already been waiting for a long while. After filing into the grounds filled with stacked boxes, men and women who had come from afar still had to climb up a two-story-high sheet-metal ladder frame before they could catch a glimpse of the "mysterious yellow world" in their minds. But why yellow? And where was the mystery? A student from Changhua, nearly 50 years old, said, "Because I thought bees were all yellow. It is mysterious because I do not understand it, and because it felt mysterious, I wanted to come and learn."
If the government will not do it, we will: young people want to fight for their own "ecological protection zone"
Therefore, Lin Chun-song, vice president of "Taiping Young Farmers," turned his mind to the farmers' association organization. Using opportunities for cooperation with other farmers, he looked for farming friends willing to go along, starting first with no pesticide spraying, combined with biological control mechanisms such as Anastatus japonicus wasps, and conducting trials plot by plot, hoping to gradually extend this experience to the entire central region, so that the ecological environment can be farmed sustainably and bees will no longer suffer from pesticide damage.
"But we know this will take a very long time," Chen Xuan-lun pointed out. For this argument to be effective, it must still be built on the premise that no one uses pesticides. Only if consensus can be formed and everyone works together can output be increased; otherwise it is very easy to fall into a vicious cycle of insufficient income. But "relying on the government is too slow, and relying on academic institutions is too remote, so we start by doing it ourselves and must fight for our own 'ecological protection zone'!"