Do Your Waggle Dance. It’s Honey Bee Day. 

Every year at Founding Farmers we celebrate Honey Bee Day, a worldwide holiday started by a group of beekeepers in 2009 to build awareness of the importance of honey bees for the future of the planet and everyone in it.  

Honey bees have been around for millions of years. Not only are they the only insect that produces food for humans – delicious honey – they are also vital pollinators. Honey bees travel to approximately 50-100 flowers during one collection trip, happily pollinating them as they go. This work is necessary to maintain the biodiversity of our food. Without honey bees, we wouldn’t have the variety of food we all know and love. 

At Farmers Restaurant Group, we are always looking for new ways to protect our bees, our food sources, and our planet. This includes supporting research on honey bees at our urban apiary at The George Washington University.  And supporting education efforts, such as our partnership with Sweet Virginia, which works to inspire and educate children about honey bees.  

We also love learning about these amazing insects. Did you know that honey bees communicate with each other by dancing? They actually have several different dances. For example, when a worker bee returns to the hive, she (worker bees are all female) dances to tell the other members of the hive she has discovered a food source, and she has another dance to tell where it is. The honey bee dances are called the honey bee waggle.  

This year, to celebrate Honey Bee Day, let’s all do something to honor the magic of the honey bee. Whether that means we buzz around to learn more information about how these amazing insects protect the earth. Or do the honey bee waggle to tell other members of our hives about how the pollination work of bees is essential to our robust food sources. Or support the efforts of other honey bee wagglers, such as groups like Sweet Virginia.  

And, of course, waggle dance yourself on over to one of our restaurants to learn more about what we are doing to support honey bees, and taste some of the delicious fruits of their labor in our food and in our drinks. We have a new honey source we are pretty excited about, Bubba’s Sweet Nectar, and it’s finger-licking, waggle-inspiring good.