Morgan Freeman converted his 124-acre ranch into a bee sanctuary to save the environment

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few months, you'll know just how crucial bees are for our now-fragile environment. However, to clue you in, bees have been declared the most important living beings on planet Earth. During the last meeting of the Royal Geographical Society of London, the Earthwatch Institute made it official. That's mostly because an approximate 70 percent of all our agriculture depends on bees and their unique ability to pollinate. Unfortunately, the global bee population has been steadily declining for the past few years due to, of course, destructive human activity. The Science Times estimates that about 90 percent of the total bee population has been completely eradicated. There's one man who's out to save the world, though: God himself. Well, okay, maybe not God, but perhaps the closest alternative we have - parttime actor and fulltime legend Morgan Freeman.

Freeman began his pursuit to save the Earth back in 2014 when he became a beekeeper. At the time, the decision was motivated by his desire to do what he can to revive and conserve the planet's bee population. While most bee activists attempt to make a difference by planting flowers for bees to slurp up some nectar from or through starting petitions to ban pesticides which kill them off, the Olympus Has Fallen star decided to do something a little more radical. He converted his huge (and we mean huuuuuge!) ranch into a bee sanctuary. The ranch measures about 124 acres, so the bees have a lot of room to play, pollinate, and populate in.

During an interview with talk show host Jimmy Fallon in the summer of 2014, Freeman revealed that he had taken up beekeeping as a hobby. This, too, was a result of the mass bee die-offs he had learned of. The actor explained that he had imported 26 hives chockfull of bees from Arkansas to his ranch, where he feeds them sugar water. While he's in love with the bees, it seems that the bees have taken a liking to him as well. The Batman Begins actor shared, "I have not ever used the beekeeping hat with my bees. They haven’t stung me yet, as right now I am not trying to harvest honey or anything, but I just feed them… I also think that they understand, ‘Hey, don’t bother this guy, he’s got sugar water here.'"

Describing his ranch-turned-sanctuary, he explained further, "There is a concerted effort for bringing bees back onto the planet… We do not realize that they are the foundation, I think, of the growth of the planet, the vegetation… I have a lot of flowering things, and I have a gardener too. As she takes care of the bees too, all she does is figure out, ‘OK, what would they like to have?’ So we have got acres and acres of clover, and we have some planting stuff like lavender, I have got like, maybe 140 magnolia trees, big blossoms." As environmental activists fight to save our planet, it is heartening to know that those with economic and celebrity privilege are doing their parts too. If you have a garden, you can leave out a bowl of sugar water in order to encourage the bee population and its growth.