Today (May 13) from 4 pm to 8 pm, Häagen-Dazs is offering a free scoop of its new Vanilla Honey Bee ice cream at participating shops. The new flavor combines creamy vanilla with just a touch of real honey. Häagen-Dazs says that honey bees are the key to creating 40% of their flavors, but that they are disappearing and no one knows why. The company created this flavor to bring more attention to the plight of honey bees.

You can find a shop participating in todays free scoop promotion on this page. Enjoy your free scoop and let us know how you like the new flavor.

Every day, WalletPop will be bringing you information about a fantastic freebie. Like what you see? Check back tomorrow for more!

Here's one that will make the green-lovers feel all warm and fuzzy: Planting America will mail you the seeds to plant your very own tree. They currently have Colorado Blue Spruce, Englemann Spruce, River Birch, Paper Birch, and Red Spruce. They have all the information you need to figure out which tree will work in your climate. From the site:

Why do we give away free seeds? In an effort to plant as many trees in as many places around the country as possible, we are offering a variety of free tree seeds. Look at the list below and find a tree that suits your area and your needs. Please refer to the sowing instructions we have supplied for the best chances of success. Fill out our order form and you will receive a minimum of 250 seeds in a few days for free!* If you do not plan to plant your seeds immediately upon arrival, please refrigerate them, but they do not have an immense shelf-life and would most likely survive if planted in the spring. Thanks for helping out the Planting America cause and making your community a bit greener. We ship our seeds on Fridays.

Last weekend, my wife and I went to the Green Living Expo on Long Island. A two-day event, it was designed as a way for homeowners to learn about all the emerging green technologies that could help them develop a more environmentally-conscious, energy-conserving lifestyle. We got free tickets from my wife's boss, who runs a green engineering firm, wrangled a weekend invitation from my aunt and uncle, and got ready to experience the cutting edge of the green world.

Maybe we built it up too much.

Admittedly, there were some impressively green items on display. We learned about bamboo clothing (only $35 for a t-shirt!), solar-powered attic fans, bio-composters, and other cool technologies. We also got to see a nice variety of hippies, new-agers, and other assorted lunatics. As expected, there was a weedy-looking guy with a beard who was trying to sell his book about hiking the Appalachian trail, various people hawking crystals, and more than a few natural-remedy folks. While I'll acknowledge that natural remedies are less polluting and invasive than traditional medicine, I have yet to figure out how aligning my chakrahs will help me use less energy and reduce my carbon footprint. To put it mildly, the snake-oil quotient was pretty high.

It's kind of funny, if you think about it. Years ago, kids played with wooden blocks and Legos, arguably environmentally-friendly toys. Of course, you could point out that a tree was cut down for the blocks, and the Legos are plastic, which means they'll someday be in a landfill for a long time. But that's why I said "arguably."

So, anyway, suddenly the blocks and Legos are tossed aside for video games and battery-operated toys, and you have not only raw materials going into those playthings, but they expend a lot of energy.

So now toy makers and toy stores like Toys R Us are coming full circle and thinking green by going back to the basics, as I mentioned in a WalletPop story about a week ago. But now we've come across a toy manufacturer who manages to be "green" and have electronic toys -- that don't need batteries.

InventorSpot.com has a story about the Zen Design Group, which is making toys that last for 15 minutes, operating with the same principles a battery-operated toy has -- all you have to do is turn a little crank for 60 seconds, something kids like doing, or a parent could easily enough do. These are their SEE toys, which stand for "Safety, Ecology, Economy." Safety, you say? Sure, the inventor, designer Sun Yu, told the Detroit News that he was inspired to make these toys because of his son. When he was younger, "he used to sit in the [shopping] cart and grab batteries," Yu said. "Children learn at a very young age what batteries are and what they do." He added, "Batteries and toys are not a really good mix, a lot of kids swallow batteries."

Truly. I know that the tipping point has arrived. The United States is on its way to becoming a nation serious about preserving the environment.

Now, if you're wondering if I'm about to tell you that our government has initiated some comprehensive plan for fighting pollution, no, of course not. You'd know about that already. It would be the big story on every cable news station, and in every paper, most of the front pages probably emblazoned with the headline, "Hell Freezes Over..."

No, if you notice, these days, real policy change comes from within the business community first.

I know: the idea of Wal-Mart as a green-friendly company is a little strange, but bear with me. For $7.50, you can buy a t-shirt made of "cotton blended with polyester made from recycled Coca-Cola bottles."

What? I'm not really sure. They also have a line of Faded Glory t-shirts made of organic cotton at the same low price-point. The collection totals 94 items and includes tote bags, pajamas, shorts, and baby outfits.

Major props to Wal-Mart for offering products like these at such a great price.

A new study, conducted among 1,141 people in the United States and the united Kingdom, suggest that although people aren't just thinking a lot about the environment, their buying habits are starting to finally change.

Boy, they could have come to my household, and I would have told them that. My wife's been buying organic eggs laid by cage-free chickens for awhile, much to my chagrin because, well, I'm cheap. She's also been buying those energy efficient light bulbs, which I'm coming around to appreciate. And even I laid out a couple extra bucks for some Clorox cleaning spray called GreenWorks the other day. True, no one is going to mistake our house for a branch of the Sierra Club, but we're making some progress.

And so are a lot of people, suggests Buzzback Market Research.

For some reason, I've always taken a kind of ironic comfort in the famous quotation "Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." Although I recently learned that it's a paraphrase of a famous quote from Herodotus, I always thought that it came from Shakespeare, and I used to imagine a dedicated Elizabethan mailman, clad in breeches, stiff collar, and cloak, riding a horse in a rainstorm to get the mail through.

This, of course, stood in opposition to my mailman in Virginia, who wouldn't bother to drop off the mail if there was snow near my mailbox or if it was too muddy outside. When I moved to New York, mail service got even worse; my mail carrier canceled many of my magazines because he didn't like carting them around. In fact, I had to get a post office box just to ensure that I received my most important mail.

As gas prices have continued to climb, there has been an ever-broadening discussion of the steps that America must take to reduce its dependence on oil. Unfortunately, however, the general consensus seems to be that the situation is hopeless, the only real alternative to gas is pricey biofuels, and we should probably just throw in the towel. Consequently, it was with a happy heart that I recently read about a Whole Foods Market that is opening in Glastonbury, Connecticut.

I'm not a huge fan of Whole Foods (they're a little overpriced), and I'm not the biggest fan of Glastonbury (one of my sisters lives there, so I visit it a fair bit. Nice place, but a little boring). Still, this story cheered me up more than words can say. You see, this morning, when the manager turned on the lights, most of the energy that powered the store didn't come from the electrical grid. It came from a fuel cell.

Produced by UTC Power, the fuel cell combines hydrogen and oxygen to make water. In the process, it produces enough energy to cover half of the 46,000 square foot store's electrical and heating needs, while providing all the store's hot water. It also creates considerably less pollution than conventional power plants, and UTC estimates that Whole Foods' use of a fuel cell has generated reductions in carbon dioxide that make it comparable to planting 21 acres of forest. In terms of reducing nitrogen oxide reductions, they claim that the fuel cell is comparable to removing 100 cars from the highway per year. Another benefit is that all of the fuel cell power is produced on-site, which means that the Whole Foods could continue to operate in the case of a power outage.