Come learn more with me and other Adamah leaders at this year’s Adamah Community Summit on Sunday, Nov. 15, at Adat Shalom Synagogue.

I have been a gardener and nature lover for as long as I can remember. My passions for protecting what we have has driven me to embrace, learn and teach organic gardening, food preservation, beekeeping and all things nature. Adamah Detroit has built upon my foundation and has given me opportunities to educate and inspire others.

As the Temple Emanu-El, Oak Park Community Garden Team lead for the past seven years, I’ve spent countless hours watering, weeding, planning and maintaining a food-growing area and pollinator spaces with a team of dedicated volunteers. We also use our garden for teaching kids and adults.

Our supporting organizations, Yad Ezra and Adamah, are our tools and resources for all things gardening. And as a new beekeeper, the gardening just reached a whole new level.

The many participating Jewish organization of the Adamah network in the Metro Detroit and Ann Arbor areas gather quarterly to support and help each other with our climate action work. We also have an annual summit to showcase our work and spread the word of this movement. We are given opportunities to share and to inspire. Adamah is a beehive of activity.

As a new beekeeper, I am mesmerized by the secrets inside of the buzzing beehive. The hive is a majestic superorganism. All individual bees inside the hive work together to create an efficient sustainable species that has survived for more than 120 million years. How do these cute, fuzzy, buzzing insects do it? Let us look inside the hive.

Inside the Hive

The queen bee is the center of the hive. She is the only individual that lays fertile eggs in the wax comb. She can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day! She is the mother of all the bees in her hive. Without a Queen, a hive will not survive. The worker bees have no purpose, no reason to forage for pollen or nectar to feed the young, and no reason to make honey when they have no queen. They know this, and should they become queen-less, they do something about it immediately. They make a new queen!

A beehive in Michigan needs 60-80 pounds of stored honey to survive a winter. This seems like a daunting amount of food reserves for one individual worker bee, who makes only one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her short lifetime of six weeks. But with the entire hive working together, all 50,000 of them, they make it happen. They eat the stored honey during the coldest of days. They protect the queen in the center of the cluster. And they beat their wings 200 times per second to keep everyone warm. They work together to survive.

Helping the Climate

The same goes with climate change. The work seems daunting. How can one person make a difference? It’s often overwhelming and difficult to see the positive side. But with the hundreds of worker bees in the Adamah network, and the thousands that we touch and influence, we are making it happen.

So, just like the queen bee and her brood, we need a leader to help give us purpose and strength and impact with numbers. Without Adamah’s leadership, we would all be separate organizations trying to mitigate climate change by ourselves. But by working together and supporting each other, we are making a difference. We are doing this work for the survival of our species. We are making the sweet honey of our future, together.

Adamah is a hive of activity. The network members are the workers. Some of us work on solar energy, some on composting programs, some on meatless eating events, some on native plants, pollinators and food gardening. Some of us are getting in touch with nature to better understand, appreciate and preserve it.

We educate others of the necessity to survive as a species by mitigating climate change. We feed the young this knowledge; we build our hive of programs with efficient methods; we guard our hives from intruders who want to see us gone; we forage food to help others. We use nature as our partner and friend. All of us are working on our sustainability not as individuals, but as a species, trying to survive.

Adamah is the model of the hive. With the help of our hive mates, we are taking action. With purpose and intention, we can make it happen.

Come learn more with me and other Adamah leaders at this year’s Adamah Community Summit on Sunday, Nov. 15, at Adat Shalom Synagogue.

Adamah’s Julie Rosenbaum adds, “As we approach Rosh Hashanah, we hope this time is buzzing with sweetness, intention and celebration. Here at Adamah Detroit, we wish you and yours deep joy, health for our community and health for this beautiful Earth we care for. Cheers to a wonderful 5787! L’shanah tovah u’metukah!”

If you’d like to join our hive, contact [email protected]. Judy Front is a master gardener and beekeeper. She is available for slide show presentations and demonstrations about beekeeping. She is an active member of the Southeastern Michigan Beekeepers Association (SEMBA) and is a student teacher of the SEMBA Bee School at Tollgate Farms in Novi.

Story by: Judy Front | The Detroit Jewish News