The first settlers who brought honey bee hives in woven skeps to the colonies from Europe in the early 1600s could never have imagined today’s commercial beekeeping industry. Now more than a million hives crisscross the country on flatbed semis, providing essential pollination services so that the resulting produce (not unlike the bees) can be shipped to consumers from coast to coast.
Today, honey bees are considered “livestock”, and most are managed intensively by commercial, migratory beekeepers who work to keep up with the demand of equally intensive, industrial agriculture. The world’s largest pollination event is in California each February to March where more than 1,600,000 hives pollinate the state’s 800,000 + acres of almonds.
Nor would the settlers have predicted that bees, both managed honeybees and the 4000 species of native bees, would be unable to find enough food in a vast country filled with such rich and abundant flora.
While we cannot turn back the clock, we can help by taking important action. To repeat Dr. Marla Spivak’s urgent plea, grow more flowers, including vines, ground covers, perennials, annuals, shrubs and trees. Plant mostly natives since they thrive where they evolved, and support the pollinators with whom they co-evolved. Cultivate without pesticides.
I recommend you plant flowers everywhere you can imagine – containers on apartment decks, in landscapes where you work, live, worship, play, go to school, and shop. Plant flowers along roadsides and in empty lots.
If you cannot or do not want to plant flowers, here are some other things you can do:
• Understand where and how your food is produced. From the seeds that are planted in California’s Central Valley or in Peru or China to the produce at your grocery store, learn what happens along the way. Consider purchasing locally produced food that is grown with more sustainable practices. Better yet, grow at least some of your own food. Join or start a community garden.
• Support you local beekeeper and buy real, natural, local honey. Like vintage wine, local honey is a unique reflection of a specific place in time. Each of my honey harvests is a taste ‘picture’ of the flowers that bloomed during that season within just a mile or two of our farm. I even label it: “A Taste of Summer 2015”, or “Appalachian Spring 2014”. The French use a hard-to-translate word to describe this utterly unique characteristic, “terroir”.
• Reduce the size of your lawn. This bears repeating from an earlier post. Author of the groundbreaking, prophetic book, “Bringing Nature Home”, Doug Tallamy urges all of us, along with the landscaping industry, to upend the standard use of the lawn as the default element, with plants added to it. Instead, put a variety of elements into the yard (places to retreat, to sun, to have shade, to play, to picnic, to grow food and cut flowers) and let the lawn be the green carpeted walkway that leads us to these destinations and defines borders.
• Reduce or eliminate use of toxins, not just pesticides in the garden and landscape, but all toxins. Our soils and waters, and even our bodies and the bodies of many animals are becoming contaminated with poisons in so many of our household products. Two chemicals in the news and generating much controversy: glyphosate (active ingredient in Roundup) and the family of neonicitinoids. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to start testing certain foods for residues of glyphosate, the world’s most widely used weed killer (1.4 billion pounds/year) after the World Health Organization’s cancer experts in 2015 declared the chemical a probable human carcinogen. Neconicitinoids, often called “neonics” are systemics. The toxins are taken up by a plant through water in the soil and circulated through the vascular system, showing up not only on the foliage (the leaves those young monarch caterpillars eat) but also in pollen and nectar. Neonics, including imidicloprid, are active ingredients in many of the lawn and garden chemicals most home owners purchase, and are used by most large producers of bedding plants sold by many nurseries and garden centers. A recent, even-handed summary of scientific studies, published by The Xerces Society, looked at the impact of neonics on beneficial insects, especially bees. The full 44-page report as well as a 2-page summary are available for free at:
• Educate yourself and others. Ask questions, share the answers and encourage folks to continue learning and understanding the complex issues around pollination. Did you know that a swarm of honey bees is nothing to fear?
In fact, this crowd of bees is an old queen with half her original colony in search of a new home. She left soon-to-be-born daughter queens and the other half of the colony’s population back in the original home. One colony becoming two. Swarming is how honey bees procreate, and is the goal of every healthy colony – to get big and strong enough in mid to late spring to be able to split into two colonies. Often the cast swarm doesn’t make it through the first winter. If you see a swarm, call the Extension office. They will give you a beekeeper contact who will come to the rescue. Beekeepers love swarms.
• Look for more ways to connect, or re-connect, to the natural world. We, all of us – plants, animals and those animals we call “people” – are in this together.
Written by Diane Almond, Extension Master Gardener Volunteer