Today is United Nations Day.
The headquarters of the UN in New York City is a pretty interesting place if you’re interested in geopolitics, world history or beekeeping.
You can find the headquarters of the UN in New York City.
The 18 acre campus is home to most of the main bodies of the organization, like the Security Council and the General Assembly.
Technically it’s international territory, so one thing the tour guides sometimes recommend is to buy some stamps and send postcards back to your home country.
Visitors can see maps and artifacts that show some of the huge changes that have taken place since the UN was founded at the end of World War II.
And there’s a large collection of artwork, given as gifts from UN member countries.
Some of the art highlights the cultures of the world; other pieces honor historic events and figures.
And some get people to think about UN priorities like world peace and addressing hunger.
In 2017, the UN Sculpture Garden received a gift of three beekeeping boxes from the group Bees Without Borders.
They wanted to highlight how beekeeping can help people in remote or low-income areas create jobs, improve food security and protect ecosystems.
The UN bees can make hundreds of pounds of honey a year while also pollinating the nearby Rose Garden.
The United Nations must’ve liked them, because in 2021, they added bees to the UN offices in Vienna, Austria.
The story of these extraterritorial bees just keeps getting sweeter.
In the world of fishing, there’s a term – “ghost gear” – for the nets, lines and other stuff that’s either discarded or lost in the water.
Ghost gear can cause problems for marine life.
A group of artists known as the Ghost Net Collective is trying to raise the profile of this issue with an exhibit called Incoming Tide.
They’ve used ghost gear recovered from the ocean to make sculptures of the sea creatures that are affected by the problem.
The United Nations Makes Its Own Honey (Untapped New York)
