Angelina Jolie highlights the importance of beekeeping
I thought I knew something about bees and beekeeping and training, and I thought I understood the importance.
Hyderabad: Angelina Jolie spoke about the importance of bees as the insect population dwindles in a video interview with ‘Vogue’. The Academy Award-winning actor and humanitarian was named the godmother of UNESCO and Guerlain’s Women for Bees programme in March, and recently met with members of the programme’s first class at l’Observatoire Français d’Apidologie (OFA) in Provence, France, for their graduation.
“I thought I knew something about bees and beekeeping and training, and I thought I understood the importance. But really, when you really dig into it and you really start to learn about what, for example, what we would lose, 30% of the honey bees disappearing. Had we not had the beekeepers and the work of places like OFA, we would lose them. What happens when we lose them? What happens when we lose them all?” she said, as reported on ‘People’.
The Women for Bees initiative seeks to train and support 50 female beekeeper-entrepreneurs from around the world over five years, with a goal of repopulating 125 million bees by 2025, ‘Vogue’ reported.
In the video, a programme participant further touched on the importance of bees, explaining: “Bees are the most important animal on earth. Through their pollinating services, they offer 1 out of 3 bites of food that we eat every day. The world would be completely different without bees.”
“I wasn’t a young environmentalist, right? I’m more a humanist. I’ve been very active in displacement in the politics of, you know fighting against persecution,” the 46-year-old explained. “But, it always leads back to the environment. Even displaced people are often displaced because of the damage to the environment,” she added.
