Pollinator Week is Every Week

Apologies if you're receiving this missive a second time! There were some bugs (of the pollen-free digital kind) to work out...

This newsletter has been in hibernation for many a year... so, if you have no idea why you're receiving a newsletter about bees, feel free to unsubscribe (link at the end of this email), and you'll hear no more buzzing of any kind, promise!

For years, I've struggled with... well, with many things, haven't we all? But here, I've struggled to write about bees. Even though I adore bees!

On the one hand, there's such a feeling of wonderment over all things that buzz. On the other hand, for many years I've felt (and continue to feel) a troubling, ever-growing sense of alarm over their well-beeing, now and into the future.

Bees are incredible... social bees such as bumble bees learn from one another and pass their knowledge down through generations. Large carpenter bees pass their homes along to the next generation (since carpentry is hard work on mandibles)! As do the sandstone bees that live in the desert (deserts being one of the most surprisingly biodiverse environments, bee-wise).

In studies with spheres and cubes, bumble bees have shown that they can recognize an object by sight, which they only previously touched in the dark (or recognize an object by touch, which they only ever saw before), suggesting that bees maintain internal mental representations of objects.

The more research that's done, the more it becomes clear that bees are intelligent creatures who plan for the future, think and form mental maps, make choices, and show playfulness. Looking at bees through a macro lens (or simply sitting amidst the bees)... it's impossible not to see the individual characters making themselves known!

Bees are in serious trouble though, for a number of reasons (and for no one individual reason, but instead the varying interplay of all these issues, depending on the bee species and locality). Between habitat loss and pesticides, climate change, invasive species and other human impacts, as a society we are remaking our living world in ways that often make life much harder for pollinators.

Many people are concerned (understandably and rightly) about underrepresented (human) voices. Similarly, there are vast numbers of tiny buzzing 'voices' that are never heard, often hardly considered. Our bees–upon which our lives depend, and indeed our living world as we know it–are among these underrepresented groups.

Some people are listening to the buzzing world, thank goodness! There's plenty that we as individuals, families, and communities can do that will vastly improve the lives of our fuzzy little friends.

One of the most rewarding is planting flowering plants. Like us, bees benefit from a varied diet (think many different types of flowers, in their case) so as to obtain all the micro-nutrients that make for a happy, healthy bee life. Bees have dramatically different 'tongue' lengths too, which means that certain bees are adapted well to certain sorts of flowers, and utterly unable to drink from other kinds of flowers. So the more varied the pesticide-free flowers on display, the more abundant and diverse the bees in that area will bee.

For regional plant lists and planting guides, as well as pollinator meadow planning and inspiration, see savebees.org/habitat

Speaking of diversity... it'll come as no surprise to some of you, and as a great surprise to others: of the 21,000 or so described bee species in the world, less than a dozen species are honey bees (seven, last I checked, though there can be surprising disagreement on the exact number). Bumble bees are a larger group, at around 250 described species. All those thousands of other bees have wildly different lifestyles from the kinds of bees that make honey inside hives of many workers, a handful of drones, and one queen.

Solitary bees most often burrow into the soil, tucking away provisions for a small number of offspring they'll never meet. These smaller bees often nest in aggregations buzzing with activity in season... bees zipping to and fro, from home to flowers and back, so many times a day. How they distinguish their own small burrow from their neighbors is sometimes an issue, resulting in buzzing skirmishes if accidentally entering another's burrow!

Some bees sparkle with metallic green hues, whilst others are so tiny as to be almost invisible (one little desert bee is just under 2mm long). One of the largest bees is the bright orange and black Patagonian bumble bee, whose queens are rumored to reach 1.6" (4cm) in length! Though this fuzzy "flying mouse" of a bee is critically endangered now, because European buff-tailed bumble bees were introduced to the areas where it used to live.

Why are we moving bumble bees around the world? Turns out they've even been taking flights across the Atlantic... on plane wings, not bee wings!

Tomatoes... one of most rewarding plants to grow in one's garden, porch, or even balcony. When I bought organic tomatoes in the past, I thought I was doing a good thing for bees... never imagining that, conventional or organic, I might well be supporting the commercial bumble bee industry. I had no idea such a thing even existed, at the time. Since then, I've come to wonder why there isn't a bee-friendly food label for ethical treatment of bees (similar to free-range and certified-humane labeling).

The commercial bumble bee industry sprung up when it was realized that certain species of bumble bees can be reared en masse, then boxed up and mailed to commercial growers, so as to pollinate crops like greenhouse tomatoes. Bumble bees are very efficient pollinators of tomatoes (whereas honey bees can't do it). Tomatoes are unusual: you need a bee capable of shaking the hidden pollen lose, and only certain types of bees can do this, bumble bees among them.

The trick, as far as the bee is concerned, is to decouple wing muscles from wings, then vibrate those muscles, releasing a shower of pollen into the air (this is known as buzz pollination, owing to the accompanying buzzing sound). Pollen has a slightly negative charge, while bees build up a slightly positive charge as they fly, so bees even 'pull' the pollen grains toward themselves through the air!

It's too bad that bumble bees ended up being shipped outside their native ranges just to give us ever-more store tomatoes, because the unintended consequences have been serious (as they so often are). Native bumble bees in the Western US suffered precipitous declines soon after commercial bumble bee pollination picked up. It is thought that commercially-reared bumble bees, often sadly suffering from higher virus loads and pathogens, spread their foreign pathogens to native wild bees.

If one looks closely into any of our impossibly-large-scale modern agricultural systems, one ends up wondering how it is that anyone with the slightest emotional feeling could allow these things to exist. Most only make sense with a relatively short-term way of thinking, or a single-minded focus on money (or both).

"The negotiations and logistics surrounding the renting of honey bees have become so complex that many beekeepers and growers rely on 'bee brokers' to bring the two parties–pollinator and pollinatee–together... So just like that, something that used to happen freely now requires three layers of managment–keeper, broker, and grower–to unite flower and bee. It is a very American story: creating a market where once there were just bugs and plants and unfettered visitation." –Hannah Nordhaus writing of fourth-generation beekeeper John Miller in The Beekeeper's Lament (2011)

Looking at the commercial bumble bee industry, or even the honey bee industry, it's hard not to see the larger signs of critical problems in our modern relationships with the natural world. It is as though humanity, by and large, has decided that the non-human (I prefer other-than-human) world consists simply of raw materials and resources that we can use to make our own lives more comfortable.

For our abundant grocery store tomatoes, factory-raised bumble bees end up confined in their colony boxes at the commercial grower's whim, rather than flying at their own discretion. Rather horrifyingly, there are times when their colonies are incinerated at the end of the season, since the grower is 'done' with them, and has been warned of the harms to wild bees of releasing non-native bees.

We 'fix' one thing, we break another... and yet what's really broken are all the many mutually beneficial connections we once had with our kindred animal, plant, and fungal partners. With the real and living world. There was once a time when abundant bees buzzed freely amidst a plethora of local flowering plants.

When I despair of the seemingly greater forces–this human world of corporations, politics, money and extraction that seeks to churn through the natural world, transforming it into human-purposed objects sent in unfathomable multitudes of boxes across continental distances... it can be a salve simply to step away into a bright and flowering community (of other-than-human lives) that one cultivates in one's own garden or within one's (fellow human) community.

People can be astonishingly creative and generative, even in the face of other peoples' acts of destruction and disregard. We can transform spaces near us into vibrant habitats supporting a diverse array of native bees and other wildlife. We can get so excited about bees that everyone we meet hears a bee anecdote or two!

One of humanity's most precious gifts is empathy. We share this world with all these other denizens, all having equal rights to a good life by their own standards. Despite our culture's focus on individualism, we're still so much a part of an interconnected living world. I think we (as a species) are currently ignoring our many connections to it at our own peril.

As far as bees are concerned, our healthy relationship with them may begin (or continue) with the simple act of planting of a seed.

Or perhaps, simply offering a warm helping hand up when they fall...

By the way, I'm sharing my bee photographs on my recently re-launched Etsy shop. It has (and is still) taking time after wildfire (Labor Day 2020 in Oregon) to feel out where to direct some of my energy. All the while, the bees have been calling to me... or more aptly, buzzing in my ear? My aim is to open windows into these bees' worlds, in order to connect more people with our essential winged friends.

Pollinator Week is Every Week

This newsletter has been in hibernation for many a year... so, if you have no idea why you're receiving a newsletter about bees, feel free to unsubscribe (link at the end of this email), and you'll hear no more buzzing of any kind, promise!

For years, I've struggled with... well, with many things, haven't we all? But here, I've struggled to write about bees. Even though I adore bees!

On the one hand, there's such a feeling of wonderment over all things that buzz. On the other hand, for many years I've felt (and continue to feel) a troubling, ever-growing sense of alarm over their well-beeing, now and into the future.

Bees are incredible... social bees such as bumble bees learn from one another and pass their knowledge down through generations. Large carpenter bees pass their homes along to the next generation (since carpentry is hard work on mandibles)! As do the sandstone bees that live in the desert (deserts being one of the most surprisingly biodiverse environments, bee-wise).

In studies with spheres and cubes, bumble bees have shown that they can recognize an object by sight, which they only previously touched in the dark (or recognize an object by touch, which they only ever saw before), suggesting that bees maintain internal mental representations of objects.

The more research that's done, the more it becomes clear that bees are intelligent creatures who plan for the future, think and form mental maps, make choices, and show playfulness. Looking at bees through a macro lens (or simply sitting amidst the bees)... it's impossible not to see the individual characters making themselves known!

Bees are in serious trouble though, for a number of reasons (and for no one individual reason, but instead the varying interplay of all these issues, depending on the bee species and locality). Between habitat loss and pesticides, climate change, invasive species and other human impacts, as a society we are remaking our living world in ways that often make life much harder for pollinators.

Many people are concerned (understandably and rightly) about underrepresented (human) voices. Similarly, there are vast numbers of tiny buzzing 'voices' that are never heard, often hardly considered. Our bees–upon which our lives depend, and indeed our living world as we know it–are among these underrepresented groups.

Some people are listening to the buzzing world, thank goodness! There's plenty that we as individuals, families, and communities can do that will vastly improve the lives of our fuzzy little friends.

One of the most rewarding is planting flowering plants. Like us, bees benefit from a varied diet (think many different types of flowers, in their case) so as to obtain all the micro-nutrients that make for a happy, healthy bee life. Bees have dramatically different 'tongue' lengths too, which means that certain bees are adapted well to certain sorts of flowers, and utterly unable to drink from other kinds of flowers. So the more varied the pesticide-free flowers on display, the more abundant and diverse the bees in that area will bee.

For regional plant lists and planting guides, as well as pollinator meadow planning and inspiration, see savebees.org/habitat

Speaking of diversity... it'll come as no surprise to some of you, and as a great surprise to others: of the 21,000 or so described bee species in the world, less than a dozen species are honey bees (seven, last I checked, though there can be surprising disagreement on the exact number). Bumble bees are a larger group, at around 250 described species. All those thousands of other bees have wildly different lifestyles from the kinds of bees that make honey inside hives of many workers, a handful of drones, and one queen.

Solitary bees most often burrow into the soil, tucking away provisions for a small number of offspring they'll never meet. These smaller bees often nest in aggregations buzzing with activity in season... bees zipping to and fro, from home to flowers and back, so many times a day. How they distinguish their own small burrow from their neighbors is sometimes an issue, resulting in buzzing skirmishes if accidentally entering another's burrow!

Some bees sparkle with metallic green hues, whilst others are so tiny as to be almost invisible (one little desert bee is just under 2mm long). One of the largest bees is the bright orange and black Patagonian bumble bee, whose queens are rumored to reach 1.6" (4cm) in length! Though this fuzzy "flying mouse" of a bee is critically endangered now, because European buff-tailed bumble bees were introduced to the areas where it used to live.

Why are we moving bumble bees around the world? Turns out they've even been taking flights across the Atlantic... on plane wings, not bee wings!

Tomatoes... one of most rewarding plants to grow in one's garden, porch, or even balcony. When I bought organic tomatoes in the past, I thought I was doing a good thing for bees... never imagining that, conventional or organic, I might well be supporting the commercial bumble bee industry. I had no idea such a thing even existed, at the time. Since then, I've come to wonder why there isn't a bee-friendly food label for ethical treatment of bees (similar to free-range and certified-humane labeling).

The commercial bumble bee industry sprung up when it was realized that certain species of bumble bees can be reared en masse, then boxed up and mailed to commercial growers, so as to pollinate crops like greenhouse tomatoes. Bumble bees are very efficient pollinators of tomatoes (whereas honey bees can't do it). Tomatoes are unusual: you need a bee capable of shaking the hidden pollen lose, and only certain types of bees can do this, bumble bees among them.

The trick, as far as the bee is concerned, is to decouple wing muscles from wings, then vibrate those muscles, releasing a shower of pollen into the air (this is known as buzz pollination, owing to the accompanying buzzing sound). Pollen has a slightly negative charge, while bees build up a slightly positive charge as they fly, so bees even 'pull' the pollen grains toward themselves through the air!

It's too bad that bumble bees ended up being shipped outside their native ranges just to give us ever-more store tomatoes, because the unintended consequences have been serious (as they so often are). Native bumble bees in the Western US suffered precipitous declines soon after commercial bumble bee pollination picked up. It is thought that commercially-reared bumble bees, often sadly suffering from higher virus loads and pathogens, spread their foreign pathogens to native wild bees.

If one looks closely into any of our impossibly-large-scale modern agricultural systems, one ends up wondering how it is that anyone with the slightest emotional feeling could allow these things to exist. Most only make sense with a relatively short-term way of thinking, or a single-minded focus on money (or both).

"The negotiations and logistics surrounding the renting of honey bees have become so complex that many beekeepers and growers rely on 'bee brokers' to bring the two parties–pollinator and pollinatee–together... So just like that, something that used to happen freely now requires three layers of managment–keeper, broker, and grower–to unite flower and bee. It is a very American story: creating a market where once there were just bugs and plants and unfettered visitation." –Hannah Nordhaus writing of fourth-generation beekeeper John Miller in The Beekeeper's Lament (2011)

Looking at the commercial bumble bee industry, or even the honey bee industry, it's hard not to see the larger signs of critical problems in our modern relationships with the natural world. It is as though humanity, by and large, has decided that the non-human (I prefer other-than-human) world consists simply of raw materials and resources that we can use to make our own lives more comfortable.

For our abundant grocery store tomatoes, factory-raised bumble bees end up confined in their colony boxes at the commercial grower's whim, rather than flying at their own discretion. Rather horrifyingly, there are times when their colonies are incinerated at the end of the season, since the grower is 'done' with them, and has been warned of the harms to wild bees of releasing non-native bees.

We 'fix' one thing, we break another... and yet what's really broken are all the many mutually beneficial connections we once had with our kindred animal, plant, and fungal partners. With the real and living world. There was once a time when abundant bees buzzed freely amidst a plethora of local flowering plants.

When I despair of the seemingly greater forces–this human world of corporations, politics, money and extraction that seeks to churn through the natural world, transforming it into human-purposed objects sent in unfathomable multitudes of boxes across continental distances... it can be a salve simply to step away into a bright and flowering community (of other-than-human lives) that one cultivates in one's own garden or within one's (fellow human) community.

People can be astonishingly creative and generative, even in the face of other peoples' acts of destruction and disregard. We can transform spaces near us into vibrant habitats supporting a diverse array of native bees and other wildlife. We can get so excited about bees that everyone we meet hears a bee anecdote or two!

One of humanity's most precious gifts is empathy. We share this world with all these other denizens, all having equal rights to a good life by their own standards. Despite our culture's focus on individualism, we're still so much a part of an interconnected living world. I think we (as a species) are currently ignoring our many connections to it at our own peril.

As far as bees are concerned, our healthy relationship with them may begin (or continue) with the simple act of planting of a seed.

Or perhaps, simply offering a warm helping hand up when they fall...

By the way, I'm sharing my bee photographs on my recently re-launched Etsy shop. It has (and is still) taking time after wildfire (Labor Day 2020 in Oregon) to feel out where to direct some of my energy. All the while, the bees have been calling to me... or more aptly, buzzing in my ear? My aim is to open windows into these bees' worlds, in order to connect more people with our essential winged friends.