Everything is up and leafing out. Now we are into the May Wait out in the garden, when all the plants are pulling at the ground like hungry kittens, trying to make flowers to tempt the emerging native pollinators. Bumbles, Orchard Masons, various flies and of course honeybees; although those are already on the job thanks to the raspberry and blueberry farmers.
You might not realize it, but shitty bastards like hornets and wasps also play their part in pollinating. So do field mice, who will clamber around on your plants at night looking for sleepy aphids and other insects to eat. So do cats, who rustle around in the garden and help plants sprinkle pollen into the breeze. In fact, so do I, wandering around among the flowers pulling weeds. I am a native pollinator! And a Native American! I know, right?
Honeybee doin' it's honey thing. Rock on, lil' bee.
I know that the media has been pushing this 'death of the pollinators' thing for years now. Kids, I haven't seen it. Yes, I've seen a shortage of apis mellifera, the common honeybee, and that's as much due to poor husbandry and lousy sanitation as it is mites and disease. One follows the other.
RANT FOLLOWS.
Skeps are transported by the DOUBLE TRAILER LOAD, by semis, twenty skeps high, and dropped off at fields, and the farmhands take them in stacks of five and put those here and there amid the fields. That's status quo. It didn't used to be that way. People used to realize that you needed to be very clean and particular when it came to honeybees.
Honeybee husbandry changed around the late Seventies. Now it has a 'throwaway' paradigm going. They're a commodity, and a valuable one. You don't just let them fly away and create wild nests, no. You ship in a bee that's adapted to a Mediterranean climate, essentially a one-season creature in this latitude, and voila, another cash crop created where none existed 50 years before.
My uncle was a beekeeper, and he would get called out to take down wild nests, which he would transfer to surgically clean skeps. All insects are susceptible to filthy conditions, molds, fungi and mites. His outfit was a lot like a cheesemaking operation - very, very clean, stainless steel equipment, live steam and iodine used to keep the product safe - and the hives and frames were treated similarly. You never saw a skep with black fungus crawling up the sides like you do now - the farmer would throw that into the fire! You never saw mass transport of skeps like you do now - the producer knew that in those concentrations a disease would move like wildfire through the entire load, as it travelled 50, 100, or more miles to it's destination. And handlers had to clean their beekeepers outfits with an iodine solution, particularly their gloves.
Out in my garden right now I have a riot of happy pollinators doing their thing. Hummingbirds, sphinx moths - hell, moths of all sorts - birds, bats...you know the saying 'Nature abhors a vacuum'? Nature is filling that vacuum out here with such enthusiasm that I have to mow the yard with my pantlegs tucked into my socks like a dork because the ground wasps get pissed off. Bumblebees will just dive and smack into you.
Chubby bumblebee just pollinating your world for all it's worth!
Queen hornets, which are waking up right about now, will just follow you around by the scent of your exhale and menace you and land on you and generally act like assholes and sting you for no reason. Or even take a bite out of you with their freakin' jaws if you've cracked a heavy, salty sweat. Yes. They do that. They think you're dead, you see. That's what hornets do - clean up carrion and pollinate things. If you smell like carrion, well...shit gonna happen.
We are not at the brink of disaster. We are being taken for idiots by Big Agriculture. I see this every year. I've had people who work with bees on an artisanal level tell me the same thing that I've just said. It's not so much a problem of disease as it is husbandry and stock.
Something to bear in mind: The honeybee is not native to America. Nope. It was brought here from Europe. (Fuck you, Europe.) They went feral and adapted. Before that, it was just native pollinators, and if ya don't believe me, read this: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-species-native-bees-are-united-states?qt-news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_
If ya don't believe me, that's SCIENCE up there in that link.
We're gonna make it.
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