About bees

[applestar]

I've been following this thread with interest. I've also sent the link to a bee keeping friend.

What jal_ut said about pesticides -- it confirms my own conviction not to use chemicals in my own garden. My entire back yard is planted to be a butterfly garden, and the lawn there is full of dandelions, clover, and ground ivy . Bees love them.

Yesterday, I was picking pole beans -- as I was pushing the leaves aside looking for beans, bumblebees were weaving in and out around me looking for flowers. I have a new favorite native wild flower called Eupatorium havanense (white ageratum-like flowers with intensely sweet fragrance). The honeybees are all over these late season blossoms.

I leave overgrown bolted vegetables and herbs way past their time because I can't bear to take them away from the bees.

Then, there's my giant patch of red shiso (perilla). This was a tricky situation because last year, I let them go too long and the seeds shattered (hence the giant patch). This year, I waited until the flowers were over but the seeds weren't fully ripe to harvest/clean up.

I feel good knowing visiting bees can safely collect nectar and pollen in my garden.

[Diane]

Mine too. My plan was to have something blooming from early spring until fall. And I do.
For the last week or so I've gone out later than usual and noticed few bees. I was a little worried because I had just cleaned/raked most of my yard and read that they may make their home in the ground.

While thinking I may have disturbed their home, a bumble bee came 10 inches from my face, dancing back and forth so that I couldn't ignore it, then went up to a roof next door and went inside a groove.

[rainbowgardener]

I got stung by a bee Monday while gathering herbs; my hand is still swollen. Mostly it makes me feel bad for the bee-- while I never saw the bee, I believe it was a honeybee, because it left a stinger in me, and because right after that I saw another one on the same basil I had been picking. That means I killed a honeybee . So good news/ bad news. I have honeybees around my herb garden and I killed one of them...

Definitely agree with applestar re no chemicals in a garden that is designed to be a haven for wildlife of all varieties. I have one garden (two really, it's two sort of 20x3' strips on either side of a path) that is all hummingbird, butterfly, songbird plants as well as the herb garden and other stuff that the bees love. Definitely don't want anything around that is bad for them. And like Diane and others, I have worked to be sure that there is something blooming from early spring at least til frost. I recently brought in a beautiful bouquet of fall flowers for the table.

[promethean_spark]

Things aren't so bad as folks claim, if we look at world food production, by weight:
Rank Commodity Production (Int $1000) Flag Production (MT) Flag
1 Sugar cane 32090140 A 1590701770 A
2 Maize 38394490 A 791794584 A
3 Rice, paddy 130994000 A 659590623 A
4 Wheat 72917380 A 605994942 A
5 Cow milk, whole, fresh 144976500 A 566850186 A
6 Potatoes 34821630 A 309344247 A
7 Sugar beet 10907030 A 246713216 A
8 Vegetables fresh nes 41856900 A 245079450 A
9 Soybeans 44666580 A 220532612 A
10 Cassava 14051950 A 214515149 A
11 Barley 3265138 A 133431341 A
12 Tomatoes 30327200 A 129942416 A
13 Sweet potatoes 7073337 A 107667971 A
14 Watermelons 9491603 A 97434562 A
15 Indigenous Pigmeat 96440380 A 95235648 A
16 Buffalo milk, whole, fresh 42629460 A 86574529 A
17 Bananas 12065270 A 85855856 A
18 Indigenous Chicken Meat 85618380 A 73402695 A
19 Cabbages and other brassicas 9417104 A 68918014 A
20 Grapes 31183820 A 67221000 A

Only a couple of the top 20 require insect pollination. Bee-keepers are overstating their importance somewhat. If we were instead facing 'cereal crop collapse disorder' that would be a far more dire threat to civilization and humanity. As gardeners we don't grow those crops often because they're dirt cheap and require some specialized hardware to harvest and process for eating, so we have a view of growing food that's somewhat skewed towards fruit and fresh vegetables.

Meanwhile, the thesis of that documentary is pretty weak: namely "With all the other pests and diseases affecting honey bees, systemic pesticides, despite their involvement being far from clear, are the straw that broke the camels back". Oddly, the pesticides in question have been in use since the 80's, yet CCD is a new phenomenon. Even if a weak link is established, that is alone not cause to ban anything, we would first have to look at the relative cost of going without systemic pesticides (meaning more spraying of contact insecticides and losing the ability to grow some crops) and that of improving the health of the bees by better management of other ailments and avoiding areas/seasons where such pesticides are often used. That's a long boring process, but careful deliberation and research is the most reliable way to ensure that the problem is solved in a manner that produces the best outcome for everyone involved.

[rainbowgardener]

I came in on just the last two minutes of an NPR show interviewing someone whose name I didn't catch who just published a book called The Disappearance of Bees and the Coming Agricultural Crisis (or some title very close to that). Anyway he was saying the experts at this point don't believe it is any one factor but the cumulative effects of a number of things reaching a tipping point.

He mentioned in one sentence at the very end that they had discovered that as opposed to large scale industrial/commercial beekeeping small scale organic beekeepers working in conjunction with small scale organic farms/ orchardists were not having problems!!

Are we surprised?? I think permaculturists and organic gardeners will not be in the least surprised by this news. Diverse gardens/farms (opposite of monocultures) grown as natural systems without the use of herbicides/pesticides/ synthetic fertilizers will turn out to be the solution to most of the problems we are having today.

I also recently heard a lecture by Michael Pollan author of In Defense of Food, Omnivores Dilemma and others. (I heard him in person--if you get the chance, he is well worth listening to!) He is talking about healthy eating and the relationship between healthy people and healthy agriculture and coming to the same conclusion as above.