Bleddyn Lake, from Friends of the Earth Wales has won the annual Sheila McKechnie Foundation (SMK) ‘Outstanding Leadership’ award which seeks to recognise an individual who has provided outstanding leadership to their organisation or community in pursuit of change.
Bleddyn started working on Friends of the Earth’s Bee Cause campaign a few years ago and quickly had success in persuading the Welsh Government to draw up a new Action Plan for Pollinators. As part of this he sits on a Pollinator Taskforce group which was set up to look at all aspects of pollinator health and welfare in Wales.
Bleddyn devised the ‘Bee Friendly’ scheme as a way to engage schools, communities, universities, councils and other public bodies in Wales in a fun way to help protect bees and other pollinators in Wales. To gain Bee Friendly status, all a group has to do is to complete a set of actions to help pollinators from 4 different categories: food, habitat, community involvement and pesticides.
Once accreditation has been granted, the organisation can officially call itself ‘Bee Friendly’ and a network of regionally based volunteer ‘Bee Champions’ has been set up around Wales to help groups get started.
This scheme is the first such national pollinator accreditation scheme of its kind anywhere and is already attracting plenty of interest with many towns, schools and universities already working towards their Bee Friendly status. Some schemes have buzzed in to action very quickly and have already secured their accreditation with Hay on Wye Primary School becoming the first Bee Friendly school in Wales and Swansea becoming the first Bee Friendly University. Conwy Council has led the way amongst Local Authorities and the race is on to become the first Bee Friendly town and city.
Bee Friendly Monmouthshire 