 Good afternoon everyone. So I'm going to talk about bees. I have a kind of very short Talk three parts the good story the bad story and then some good news at the end so The agency is here in Copenhagen. It's in Kong's new tour and one of the things that my staff particularly Feel very strongly about is not only do we have actually the greatest jobs on the planet because we get to Interfer often with governments and with industry and try to get them to do a better job But one of the things that's frustrating sometimes is that it's all about paperwork and sitting in the office So about two years ago We decided that we wanted to really do something to make a difference and we found here in Copenhagen a fantastic project It's called booby. It's a social project Really aimed at trying to give people who are socially disadvantaged and homeless an opportunity to create revenue to create a living and When you meet some of the beekeepers you discover that actually beekeeping has saved their lives in some cases Well, what did we do? Well last year we built an entire facade of flowers and effectively brought to Copenhagen urban farming vertical farming and on that basis We then put beehives up on the top of the roof and it's a totally Simple thing to do, but I think what's special about the project is that and we produce lots of honey We produced Many many kilos on a particular day and all through the year we get different kinds of honey So this one is flavored with linden trees. So 60 kilos harvested over a 24-hour period So you get a lot of honey out of two big hives So we have 80,000 bees. They seem to be quite happy But what's really nice is the beekeepers they then come and harvest it They take it to the bee factory to the honey factory and then they sell it on So bees are absolutely amazing because often people say to me, ah, you know bees in an urban setting that's really bad It's really polluting But you know when a bee goes out harvesting and just to give you an idea to harvest a kilo There's probably been about a hundred and forty four thousand kilometers flown. So these bees are very very busy When a bee arrives at the at the hive and it's been harvesting across the city Of course, it's going to pick up pollen and nectar that is Contaminated it will have some heavy metals in it because of air Quality to do with cars and so on but when the bee arrives it's sort of met by another bee that then Takes the now. This is the spit not the shit takes the spit and then absorbs it And then goes and sits in a corner and effectively cleans that up before it then goes and puts it in to the comb And all of those sort of heavy metals sit in its body and it just absorbs them and takes them out So what we end up with is probably one of the cleanest purist food sources that you can possibly get so anyway The project's going as I said, it's it's here in comms. Neutral We're trying to persuade a lot of other rooftops to take this on but we're not the only place the Opera in Paris has had them for 25 years and they harvest 500 kilos of honey So these are things that are well understood and one of the things that we're doing in the agency is to try To visit cities all over the world. New York is one and many others and persuade mayors to change their views about people having Bees on the rooftops because there's many many myths, you know bees they create swarms. They're dangerous You know they'll sting people But I want to just talk just for a couple of minutes about more to do with pollution One of the things that worries me when I listen to many of you talking about foraging Probably not up in the northern part of Sweden, but but that might also be a case is that we Monitor and observe all over the world the impacts of European industry and A very very sobering thought is that if you go to Greenland one of the potentially cleanest places on the planet There is virtually no industry there If you look at the food and you test the population What you find is that the human population particularly women have the highest body burden of heavy metals and So I think one of the big challenges now is for many of us who are very very keen on Encouraging food to be grafted to be foraged and to be brought in from kind of local settings is That there's some confidence about whether the food is polluted or not And so one of the real I think big issues for me is how can we make it possible for those of you who want to Gather food in this way to be confident that it isn't contaminated that it doesn't have heavy metals or different kinds of pollutants within it what we do understand is that many places are just Kind of unknown that there are places on the planet where we just have no information And we would be delighted to host the food world as well as all the environment world and the health world Who are already kind of well on their way to developing and being part of that so thanks very much for the time