Plight of the Honeybee
Help nurture pollinators by creating a wildlife corridor—even
small urban gardens can become nature preserves!
Many gardeners are intrigued by the idea of creating a
garden that will attract and nourish birds and bees and
butterflies, but few realize that such a garden can make a
genuine contribution to the well-being of wild creatures. Bees in
particular are suffering and there’s quite a lot we can do about
it. Honeybees have been hammered by a triple blow in recent
years. Millions have died because of tracheal mites that don’t
bother solitary bees at all. Further millions have been killed by
pesticides and certain herbicides intended for other targets.
Honeybees don’t really belong in the New World, let alone the
Pacific Northwest. Originally, a few hives were brought to New
England by settlers from Europe. Soon, they had adapted to the
new land and were so naturalized that many people forgot their
non-native status. In time, honeybees made their way west with
the wagon trains.
Once here, the social honeybees lost no time in taking
over the territory. Nobody knows how many native bees (all of
which are solitary, rather than collective hive-building bees)
lost out to the more efficient honeybees. Over the past decade,
disease has evened the score, but at a terrible price for both
team players and loner bees. If you have noticed poor fruit set or
low vegetable yields in recent summers, lack of pollination may
well be the underlying cause. The best way to avoid such
problems is to encourage native bees and other pollinators to
make their homes in our gardens. To learn a lot more about the
habits and needs of our gentle, nonaggressive native bees, seek
out a pair of handbooks by Bellingham, Washington author,
Brian Griffin. The Humble Bumble Bee ($9.95) comes only as a
handbook, but The Orchard Mason Bee book ($9.95) also
comes in audio tape ($10) and video ($15) versions. All are
published by Knox Cellars Press in Bellingham.
Brian began learning about native bees through
observation. For instance, he discovered that our tiny native
solitary wasps eat aphids. Brian first found these tiny,
nonaggressive wasps when experimenting with making nesting
boxes with holes of varying sizes. One day, he noticed that a
small-holed box was filling up fast. He opened one of the the
plugs and discovered a single egg and about 75 aphids, alive but
stunned by a paralytic enzyme, stuffed into place with pine
pitch. Over time, he realized that when the wasp larvae hatch,
they eat their way out and emerge as mature wasps that will feed
on pesky garden aphids.
Many nurseries now carry both native bee and aphid-eating
wasp houses and kits. Every gardener can do a little bit toward making
bees more welcome and protected. Not using poisons is a huge
contribution. Providing housing is another. Nurseries sell Mason bee
kits, which include little apartment houses for solitary bees. These are
chunks or blocks of wood with a zillion holes drilled into them. Some
models come with paper straw sleeves, so you can change the sheets
after each season’s guests leave. Most are simple rectangles with utterly
regular grids of holes. More artistic models are irregularly shapes and
drilled, making them look more at home in naturalistic gardens. The
bees don’t really have a preference, and will use either kind of hotel
indiscriminately. ln return for your hospitality, they will pollinate your
garden. Most bees, honey or solitary, have a fairly limited range. That
means if your yard is small and your neighbor keeps bees, you will
probably reap the benefits as well. If you have a large garden that isn’t
very close to others, you may want to invest in a beekeeping kit.
Most beekeepers suggest beginning with Mason or solitary
bees because their care is very simple. Honeybee care is a lot more
complex, and uninformed beekeepers can add to disease problems
rather than resolving them. If you love the idea of keeping bees, want
to make your own honey mix, or find your fruit and vegetable
production is not what it should be, contact your local branch of the
Beekeepers Association. These kindly and informative folks will give
you all the buzz on how to get started with honey and other kinds of
bees.
If you buy them during the fall, Brian Griffin suggests storing
native bees in the refrigerator for the winter. Many refrigerators are
too dry for slumbering bees, so he advises putting the pollinator packs
into a paper bag, adding a barely moist paper towel. Check the towel
every month or so and rewet as needed through the winter. If you
already have bee houses in place, be sure they are in a cool, dry place
where rain won’t swell the wooden blocks. Brian recommends bringing;
bee houses into an unheated garage or hanging them undeneath the
eaves. Although they prefer a steady winter temperature of 38 degrees
Fahrenheit, mason bees can take quite a bit of frost. That’s because
their blood contains natural glycol, the same antifreeze we put in our
cars.
By February, when the first flowers bloom, your bee houses
can go back outside. Set mason bee houses on a warm, south-facing
wall, where they’ll get all the heat going. Bumble bee nests (which
look very different) need to be put on the cooler North side of the
house, because the sun’s heat can kill infant bumbles. In order to be
sure your early risers have plenty to eat, consider planting their spring
wake-up snacks now. ln my garden, the first bees are always found on
snow crocus, the early blooming species like golden bunch (Crocus
ancyrensis) that appear in February and March.
All the Oregon grapes are excellent bee plants, especially
forms of early flowering Mahonia aquifolium. In Brian Griffin’s garden,
the first mason bees gorge themselves on a big old lily of the valley
shrub, Pieris japonica. There are many forms of this attractive
evergreen, all decked with clustered white, fragrant flowers from late
winter through spring. Blueberries, huckleberries, loganberries, and
salal are equally popular with early bees, whose gentle hum enlivens
the garden as much as any early birds’ chirps. Plant your first flowers
on the sunny south side of the house, where the bees will find them
close at hand when they awaken. To ensure yourself (or your favorite
gardener) of a bountiful garden next year, start planning and planting
now. Next spring, when the garden is abuzz with busy pollinators,
you’ll be glad you made room for our mild mannered, productive
native bees.
Pollination Nation
It’s curious to think that we humans may owe our
culture, if not our very existence, to bees. Nearly two thirds of
the world’s flowers are pollinated by bees and other insects (like
moths, mosquitoes, and wasps). lf Dependent species include
the majority of fruits, flowers, vegetables, grains, and herbs that
have sustained us for millennia. Some plants can be pollinated
by wind or gravity or a passing animal. Others are serviced by
birds or bats. Most, however, are propagated by bees. If ripe
flowers don’t get pollinated, no fruit or food crop can form.
Without plentiful food crops, formal agriculture is difficult.
Without the abundance created by agricultural advances,
humans might still be living in hunter-gatherer clans.
Over thousand of years, humans developed a respectful,
even affectionate working relationship with bees. Bee keeping
has been commemorated by poets and garden writers as long as
humans have kept written records. Unfortunately, that
relationship has become increasingly strained: Even as
exploding world populations demand ever greater yields from
our crops, encroaching development, chemical farming, and
pollution are destroying the natural habitat of bees and other
pollinators.
What can ordinary gardeners do about it? It’s easy to
feel that such huge problems can only be solved by huge repairs,
and in many respects, that is sadly so. Even if we devote our
whole backyard to creating habitat for bees, birds, and other
native pollinators, one small patch can’t support enough wild
life to really matter. But there is great strength in numbers. If
many of us devote even part of the land in our trust to their
support, we can weave a living green web that stretches from
coast to coast.
Nearly a third of all North Americans have some kind
of garden. If we each set aside a portion of our yards for plants
that provide habitat and food for our native pollinators, that
adds up to hundreds of thousands of acres. lf each of us makes
the choice not to use pesticides and herbicides, we can
enormously reduce the toxic runoff that pollutes our waterways
and soils. Then, if each of us makes a point of taking the idea a
bit beyond our own backyards, we can stretch our influence
further still.
For instance, in my town, a family began planting
daffodils in public places, offering them free to any
neighborhood that would help plant. Now, about 8,000 new
bulbs go in each year and the roads are bright with blossom in
spring. Another family decided to plant lilacs in public areas,
adding a hundred each year. A local conservationist joined in,
offering native red currant bushes (Ribes sanguineum) to
anybody who would plant them in appropriate sites. In just a
few years, the idea of creating public plantings has taken firm
hold. Volunteer groups make bee, bird, and butterfly gardens at
local schools and teach kids to observe the creatures who come
to feed. A larger pollinator garden has been installed at the
local library, and others will be made at the city hall, the
performing arts center, and even along the town’s roads.
Gardeners anywhere can make a program like this for
their own town. The best way to begin is with small projects
that are inexpensive and simple to maintain. Schools are a good
place to start, because teachers are always excited about projects
that will actively involve kids and help them to connect with
the natural world. A pollinator garden can be used as an
outdoor classroom for science and ecology classes. Usually, it’s
easy to get help and seed money from parent-teacher groups as
well to involve them in the planning and planting of a bee,
bird, and butterfly garden. Such outreach has a long arm, since
once people begin paying attention to the small creatures
around us, they are often willing to stop using pesticides.
If these public pollinator gardens teach people only one
thing, this should be it: Think before you spray. For so many
years, advertisers (and experts who ought to have known better)
urged us to rush out and buy poison spray the moment some
poor bug annoyed us. If we were inconvenienced by wasps, well,
zap them all dead. If ants got in your peonies, wipe them out
before they get somewhere worse.
Few people actually tried to get rid of honeybees, yet
bees and many other small pollinators are just as susceptible to
all-purpose bug sprays as their less desirable relatives. What’s
more, many commonly used pesticides will kill bees a long way
from your yard. Spray drift can carry toxins clear around the
block. Sprays that run into an active sprinkler can be carried
into the sewer. Downstream, those powerful toxins can kill fish
that certainly never did anything to anybody’s lawn.
lt’s comforting to assume that wind and water will
dilute whatever form of poison we use before it harms anything
unintentionally. However, we are not alone. Millions of home
gardeners are out there with us. When we find cause to spray,
they do too. The result is deadly. ln Washington State, there is
no longer a single stream that does not show traces of diazinone,
a common toxin found in lawn weed-and-feed products.
Diazinone is not only toxic to trout and salmon, but once in the
water supply, it also kills honeybees, which are vanishing faster
than beekeepers can replace them. Weakened by frequent
exposure to pesticides, they succumb to diseases that healthy
bees can usually resist.
We have no native honeybees here. Our native bees
are mainly solitary bees, like Mason bees, that nest alone rather
than in hives. Solitary bees do a fine job of pollinating but need
our active encouragement and a clean environment in order to
thrive in great numbers. Like the imported European honey
bees, our natives are decimated by even light contact with
pesticides. Even certain herbicides (weed killers) can kill both
native bees and European honeybees. Some ecological watch
groups estimate that the native bee population is only about 5%
of what it was two decades ago.
That means that in the past twenty years, we have
killed about 95% of our native pollinator bees. We didn’t mean
to, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they are gone. I t won’t be
as easy to undo the harm as it was to cause it. Luckily, if we
want to make amends, we can. First, we can stop using toxic
pesticides and herbicides. Next, we can seek organic or
ecologically benign solutions to disease and troubling insect
relationships. lf you aren’t sure what these might be or where to
find them, ask your local nursery. If they don’t know, find
another nursery that does. ln the meantime, call your local
Master Gardener Hotline (this is a terrific program supported by
Agricultural Extension Service offices in every county.) In
other words, let’s try a little counseling before we kill anything.
@1999 Ann Lovejoy for Log House Plants
Helpful resources:
Oregon State Beekeepers Association