Virginia has a state tree and a state bird and even a state pollinator. Now, there's an effort to add a native state pollinator.
It's the bill everyone's buzzing about, introduced by state Republican Senator Mark Peake of Lynchburg to designate the brown-belted bumble bee as the official native state pollinator.
"The state pollinator as it exists is the honeybee. But the honeybee is not native," Peake says. "It is a European bee that came over in the early 1700s, which Thomas Jefferson described in Notes on the State of Virginia, he said it is not a native of our continent."
The Garden Club of Virginia says the brown-belted bumble bee has earned a coveted spot as an official emblem of the Commonwealth.
"The European honeybee just can't do it all. It's a great bee, but it can't do it all. Without the brown belted honeybee, and the 400 native bees, we would not have tomatoes," says Diane Thomas of the Garden Club of Alexandria. "The European honeybee can't pollinate tomatoes. The European honeybees cannot pollinate milkweed, so we wouldn't have monarch butterflies. So, we recognize the importance of native pollinators."
None of the senators on the General Laws Committee wanted to be a buzzkill, and the bill flew out of the General Laws Committee on a unanimous vote.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
