In 2014, actor Morgan Freeman told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon that he had recently purchased a honeybee hive in pursuit of becoming a beekeeper. At the time, Freeman said he became interested in the bees after learning about the massive drop in bee populations across the United States. He said he wasn’t interested in “harvesting honey.”
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It’s 2019, and Freeman’s hobby has turned into something better resembling a mission. The website Healthy Food House reports that the 81-year-old Academy Award winner has converted his entire 124-acre ranch in Mississippi into a sanctuary for 26 hives of bees he got from Arkansas. He’s also planted bee-friendly clover, lavender, and magnolia trees on the ranch.
Greenpeace and others have pointed to the weakly regulated use of pesticides in our country, alongside the loss of biodiversity, as the main culprit in declining wild bee populations. Most scientific evidence points to bees being essential to a healthy planet with diverse natural habitats. The current administration is willfully ignoring scientific evidence of the harms that pesticides cause all of us, and hopefully, having celebrities like Freeman shining a light on environmental needs will have a positive impact on the next administration.