 My name is Judy Byron. I'm the adult program coordinator and it's my pleasure to welcome the Honeybee Steel Band. They're awesome. I've known Emily for a number of years, other bands, and she was my percussion teacher for a short time there. I play the harp. It's a percussion instrument. I bet you didn't know that. Anyway, the Honeybee Steel Band started, they formed in 2015 in collaboration with the mobilization for pollinator survival and they have a ton of information here, flyers for you guys and such. And I really encourage you to pick it up and realize what we're doing to our pollinators because they are what are keeping our world alive, right? And you can read all the signs and such. So Emily is a virtuoso pan player and she studied at the, yeah, I think so. That was not in there. I know. I put it in there because I want to acknowledge, and I'm not, I don't want to do a spoiler. There's a surprise at the end. But she started at Northern Illinois University and got her master's in steel pan performance. I didn't even know there was such a thing, right? So anyway, so kudos, and kudos to the group for doing this. They do various festivals and parades and such, and it's all to bring awareness to this issue. And I think that's enough said because we want to hear the music and they're going to be available for Q&A after the performance. So welcome everybody and let's have some fun. I just saw my gals. This program is impossible by the generosity of the friends of the library. I didn't have that written down in my titchi. And I want to acknowledge the work that they do. They are so supportive of us and because of them, we have them in steel. So thank you friends and refreshments will follow as well. Thank you. So this next piece is popular by the Beatles. It's about the taste of our favorite drink. The drink? Yeah. The taste of my tea. Okay, that's funny. So this next thing, it kind of would be really funny if you guys danced. On this one, we purposely left some space here so you can get your boogie on. Okay, so all right, so this next tune is another one of the next kind of tunes, a Bee Bee's Favorite. We're going to have a street party. We're going to have Caribbean Dance. If you want to know more about it, talk to us after the show if you like to dance. There's going to be people practicing dance to do in the parade with us with patients and West African dance teachers. It's going to be a big spectacle. We're going to be zombies for the parade. Guess what? Zombies. So we're also playing a tune called Thriller, which of course everyone knows after Halloween is one of our favorite Halloween numbers. So we're going to do our little Halloween set for you right now, starting with Thriller. And the tune after that is called Zombie, which is written by a Nigerian Afrobeat star named Philip Anthony Cootie. And he passed away, I don't know, 20 years ago with his son, Sean Cootie, Femi Cootie. They're all performing in another version of the band that he started with. He had dozens of people in that band, Africa 70. They had a lot of dancers in addition to the band members. So that's our Afrobeat tune for the day, which is going to follow Thriller by Michael Jackson. So these are all really great tunes to dance to. Don't sit down. Two many songs. This is Aerovino. He just came back from the dead. A slower zombie. I just want to say this next tune, it's supposed to be from Niger. One of the Never Brothers passed away, Charles Never. This was a tune that featured him on the saxophone. We just wanted to, the homage didn't hit him as a musician and as one of my favorite bands, the Never Brothers. And this tune happens to be called Yellow Moon, which of course is our favorite color. I think we're missing one of our B's. Okay, are we ready? I just wanted to open this up for, if anybody had any questions for the band and the information, yeah. That's an incredible statistic. This is a great time to ask. This is different. If Vermont uses 11.5, it actually uses 12 tons per year. One teaspoon of the indented pesticide is enough to kill 1 billion, 1 billion, 250 million bees. That's one teaspoon of it. That's how deadly it is. Vermont uses 12 tons per year. It's coated on all the seeds for the corn and soy crops that are used to feed the dairy. That's why that is such a high statistic. And you can turn it around too. Another use is golf courses, okay? So out of those 12 tons per year, I forget how much it is. A ton is 2,000. So one of those tons is from golf courses. Okay, so just in case, you know, people who like to golf, I would say, we presented golf on golf courses that aren't perfect, that might feed a little bit better for the environment than a perfect department like the living room that happens to kill the biodiversity in the entire region. So we don't want them. They're systemic pesticides. They go into the plant, into the flower. They stay in the entire plant. They stay in the soil. And the poor little pollinators come to get the pollen out of the flower and it's poisonous. So they do way more than just protect this corn and soy product that's growing. So there's many other ways to farm. There's other methods of integrative pest management. We're getting farming. That would all work. We don't have to use these seeds that are pushed on the very industry by Bayer Monsanto Corporation. So we're trying to encourage the legislature to pass laws that transition us away from the use of those seeds. So that's the focus of our activities and efforts. There's a lot of people that do things like plant pollinator gardens, which are great, but that's not going to solve the problem if we continue to poison the groundwater and poison the crops year after year. And I'd like to mention also that the glyphosate coating on the... That's the new thing I was talking about. The glyphosates roundup is also poisonous to bees and birds. It damages their gut. And you might also know that it damages the gut in human beings, too. Anything grown, any food produced with those seeds is going to have residues of glyphosates in it, which causes leukemia and all kinds of other problems in people's gut. And there's billions of claims against the preparation that makes that roundup. So is that any questions? It's also killing the monarch butterflies. We have 10% of the monarch butterflies we have when I was a kid. I'm only 39. 90% are gone because of the glyphosates. One of the reasons. It's not the only cause. And I wanted to say, like, we can get our legislators to do things about this problem. If we all start calling them and saying we want to ban neonicinoids, we can make a difference. We hired them. We need to call them and tell them what we want. So we're not just going to sit around and wait for them to do something. We want to build a movement in Vermont so that we're all calling our legislators for the next session in April. Marlon is here from VPR. Roy, you have a question? Yeah. When is the parade going to be? Oh, yeah. There's going to be a parade for Halloween in Montpelier. There's a warm-up for the parade, which is like a street party on the top block of state street. We're the intersection of state and main in Montpelier, where we're going to just help people with costumes who want to join the dancers who are going to be dancing with our zombie tune in the parade. We're also going to play thriller. And we're going to, you know, have a lot of these signs for people to carry, because part of the, part of every time when we are out in public, we're trying to get the word out to educate people about this issue. Yes. What song or song will we be playing in the parade? Zombie. Zombie. The tune Halloween theme. Thriller and zombie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so Marlon. Marlon is from off the radio, by the way. Yeah. So I know that losing the bees, well, why are, why is losing the bees so important? I know that personally we're going to be missing some foods. What foods are we going to be missing from our diet, or how will the world be impacted by a lack of bees? Well, the first foods that are going to go are fruits. Okay. But bees are responsible for pollinating most crops. 75%. Yeah, 75% of the crops. So if you want to have a diet of like, you know, I think potatoes might grow without pollinators, maybe green. If you want to just eat bread and sort of like go back to middle ages kind of diet, you know, go ahead and kill the bees, you know. But I personally like my avocados. I like my blueberries. I like my berries. I like the whole diversity of fruits and vegetables in my diet. And not to mention I like to eat a bowl of cereal knowing that it's not poisonous because most of the cereal that you buy in the grocery store actually is poisonous because you'll see it does not say non-GMO. A GMO is kind of the flip side of this. What GMO is, is a genetically modified seed that's bred to grow even if it's completely poisoned. That seed will grow into something that resembles weed and can be used to make cereal. Okay? So it's not really a whole food product because it has been changed to withstand toxic pesticides. So you are going to be eating those pesticides if you just go to grocery store and buy things that don't have that nice little sticker that says non-GMO. So but the bees are responsible for basically all fruit and vegetables? Yes, all fruit and vegetables. And not only if we lose the bees will we lose all those foods that are pollinated by them but it's going to affect the food chain. So it's not just going to be the foods they pollinate. It's also going to be whatever feeds off of those foods that are longer available. We can't really imagine what it might look like. But we don't want to go there. We don't want to go there. When I first heard about this, actually it was about 10 years ago that I first heard about this problem maybe five or six years ago but I really decided to develop my music and activism to this particular issue. I've always been shocked about why is it that this issue doesn't get more coverage in the news. And I think it's because that the agriculture lobby and the pharmaceutical industry are all tied up together and the pharmaceutical industry is actually largely responsible for pushing these pesticide products onto the agriculture industry and they have billions of dollars to spend on lobbyists for all the legislative things that go through state houses in every state in this country and all over the world for that matter. So it's hard to put up a fight when there's people that are paid full-time salaries to go in there and try to make sure that laws protect farmers who are going to use their poisonous products. So it makes it really challenging and we need to build a movement and we need to get the media to agree to cover this issue. Another problem is Jackie actually yesterday I went to a workshop that she led yesterday about money. Money matters. People have investment portfolios and stock brokers that invest in these industries that make huge profits. So if you happen to have an investment portfolio that's making a lot of money because of the fact that this huge multinational corporation is reaping huge profits off of these poisonous products then it's time to change what you're doing because we can't keep supporting these industries. It's intimidating to call your stock broker and tell them what you want them to do with your money but you can tell them to divest from there. Then you can be sure you don't own there. Divest, that's right. I'm sorry. Yeah, I was just going to say in a capitalist society you have to vote with your dollar. That's right. Not just with your calling and bugging and pushing. And if you've used your dollars around it before you can forget yourself because we know you didn't know. But now that you know, if there was a bill that was going to be passed to try to legislate against neonicotinoids and run by the state in the agricultural industry, would you call, raise your hand if you would be willing to make a five-minute call to your legislator to ask them to help ban these things? Well I'm going to pass this around because when we're ready with the bill we're going to email you and say, Okay, here's the big moment. We need the constituents of these people that we've hired into the state house to know. Because just five or six or ten or twelve constituents contacting a legislator will make them pay attention to a bill. Really, I've seen it. It's amazing. So if you're in Vermont it doesn't take a lot of voices. We won't email you a lot but we'll hit you at the moment when we want you to contact your legislator and if this seems like it's for three minutes of your time, that's a huge act you can take. Yeah, I want to say something too is that we have a special role in the tiny state life in Vermont where our voices can be heard much more than they can in a huge state like California, for example. A huge state like Illinois that has a lot of this chemical farming going on. We have the possibility to make a difference. If our state is able to pass some rules then other states will follow suit. And actually there are other states that are a little ahead of us in their laws against some of these pesticides efforts. I think Maryland is a little bit ahead but Vermont really has that potential because it's small because we have a lot of contact with our legislators through town meetings and things like that. So don't be shy about going to the Vermont state of Vermont website. You can see what's happening in the legislature and look it up just in the search right Neonik. Where's the thing that says Neonikotinoid? It's a purposefully intimidating word. But if you just write Neonik, N-E-O, yeah hold that up, N-E-O-N-I-C. If you put that in the search that will bring you to any legislation that has to do with Neonikotinoids. Similar with Glyphosate, that's not quite as intimidating as Neonikotinoid. It's G-L-Y-P-H-O-S-A. It's good to know those words. Neonik. Yeah. Glyphosate. Those are our two arched energies. And Europe did ban Neonikotinoids years ago. Yes. But not us. Yeah. And they're actually having a hard time upholding that. It's similar to the way Vermont passed the rule to force people to... GMO products developed. Yeah, thank you. GMO labeling. They wanted a GMO labeling to happen. But we passed that but the corporations just kick back so much that instead of labeling foods, this is painted by GMOs, we now have the little thing that says non-GMO. That we can put on any product that is not using genetically modified seeds and therefore use toxic pesticides. Yeah, watch for that little GMO, non-GMO label. It has a butterfly on it. I think we're done. Thank you so much. Thank you. We have refreshments. We have refreshments for yummy cookies and cider. Help yourself.