Google gets sweet on bees with interactive Earth Day Doodle

Google is celebrating Earth Day this year by causing a bit of a stir with a busy little bee that helps us stay alive. Literally.

The annual celebration, which takes place on Wednesday of this year, was founded in 1970 and aims to raise awareness of environmental problems. Events around the world promote recycling, pollution reduction, and planetary care.

To mark this year’s Earth Day, Google worked with The Honeybee Conservancy, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting bees, to create an interactive doodle in which a bee does its important flower pollination business. Users can use their keyboard mouse to navigate the bee from flower to flower, pollinate flowers, and unlock cool facts about bees and their importance in sustaining life on Earth.

Guillermo Fernandez founded The Honeybee Conservancy in 2009 to save bees and help underserved communities to produce healthy food and build green spaces. Bees pollinate about 30% of the food we eat, but a quarter of the 4,000 species of bees native to North America are at risk of extinction, Fernandez wrote in a Google blog post highlighting the crucial role that bees play in healthy ecology.

“On a larger scale, the survival of the world depends on it,” wrote Fernandez, who is the managing director of the organization.

Fernandez tells how he grew up in a “food desert” that is characterized by poverty and widespread health problems such as obesity, diabetes and asthma. Most local food sources were processed food supermarkets or fast food chain restaurants, and residents had no idea where their food came from or how to plan a balanced meal.

“The underfunded education system and the limited green spaces made the problem even worse: there were no learning paths,” wrote Fernandez. “My situation was not unique – in the United States alone, 13.5 million people live in food deserts and 30 million suffer from food insecurity.”

To protect bee populations and improve “food literacy”, The Honeybee Conservancy offers honey bee hives and local apiaries as part of its sponsor-a-hive program to organizations such as schools and gardens.

“By removing financial and educational barriers (keeping beehives is a costly investment that requires training), we are creating access to resources that in turn produce food, improve the environment, and bring people together,” he writes.

According to Fernandez, the doodle captures the importance that a single bee plays in the world and underlines how the small actions of individuals can lead to great results.

And you don’t have to be a beekeeper to make a difference. Fernandez suggests investing in local beekeepers by buying locally made honey and beeswax products. He also recommends donating time and money to local environmental groups.

Seventy percent of the local bees live underground. By providing exposed, undisturbed ground or nesting boxes, they are a safe haven. You can also create a bee bath with clean water and stones so that the bees can have a drink, or a garden with pollinator-friendly plants that is a source of food.

“There is no sweeter feeling than knowing that you helped save the bees,” Fernandez wrote, providing a link to Learn more about bees and ways you can help. “At least we hope you move on to today’s Google Doodle to learn more about our helpful, winged friends!”