These Lexington students are on a mission to save the bees. They want your help.

There's a project going on at Lexington's Paul Laurence Dunbar High School that makes some people cringe at first. Until they hear the rest of the story.

Jin Cho and her fellow students on the Dunbar Community Problem Solving Team are on a mission to save the lives of bees, and they want everyone in the community to help them.

Why try to save scary bees, they've been asked. The students, whose award-winning project to save the declining bee population in Kentucky will take them to an international problem-solving competition next month, tell people that bees are peaceful creatures and people need them.

Bees are the world's top pollinator, the students explain. They move pollen to help flowers and plants grow and are essential for the production of food including strawberries , apples, bananas, oranges, and tomatoes.

"Due to increasing rates of climate change and the overuse of harmful pesticides, the bee population across the United States are in decline. which threatens the effective pollination of various plants, species across the globe," team members wrote in a formal paper.

The students wanted to increase awareness of threats to bee populations and encourage a better attitude toward bees. They decided to contact farmers, to reach out to beekeepers and to talk to elementary students in an effort to get rid of the stigma surrounding bees. They're also working with other environmental groups and clubs inside and outside Dunbar, said teacher Ben Crawford, the faculty adviser for the group.

Jin, a senior, said one thing people can do is to not use pesticides that could kill bees. They can also plant bee-friendly flowers such as the forget-me-not or the coneflower.

"Bees aren't just around to sting people and be annoying, but they actually help the environment as a whole and help us grow the food that we eat," said Crawford.

Project Bee stands for Broadcasting Environmental Endangerment. Crawford said the students have pitched their initiative to Arbor Day visitors at Lexington's Arboretum and to the community as a whole through a website and social media sites.

Dunbar's team won first place in the high school division of the state's Community Problem Solving competition in March and will join other Kentucky winners in June at an international competition in Wisconsin, Crawford said.

Next week, the team will work with science class students and community service club members at Dunbar to start preparing a garden on the school grounds for planting bee-friendly flowers.

"The honey bee in particular is dying by the millions," said science teacher Keia Newsome. Newsome's students will do some weeding in the garden as part of learning about the bee population problem.

As part of the Community Problem Solving Team project, the high school students have partnered with second-graders at Meadowthorpe Elementary in Lexington. In one initiative, the high school students send the younger students educational videos about the problem and ask for feedback.

Meadowthorpe second-grade teacher Lori Smith said Dunbar students have also planted seeds and decorated pots with her students. "My students really enjoyed the interactions with the high schoolers," she said. "Some of them don't have older kids in the home. It was really nice for them to work together.."

The second-graders told the Dunbar students that while they were scared of bees at first, they eventually realized they were important, said Jin.

"I think we did achieve our goal in that we were able to teach them that bees aren't scary," she said.

This story was originally published May 6, 2018 at 5:56 PM with the headline "These Lexington students are on a mission to save the bees. They want your help.."