To Bee or Not To Bee?

Bees have an enviably intimate relationship with flowers. As much as I love my peonies, daisies, hollyhocks and lavender,  lavish attention on them, water them, weed them, feed them and protect them from the hail, and absolutely glory in their fragrance and lushness when they reward me by showing their dazzling blossoms, I simply cannot manage to crawl between their luxuriant, fragrant petals and delicate, soft  pink or purple folds, or to roll my entire body to revel in their fragrant and nutritious pollen, and unfurl my probing tongue to taste the deepest, sweetest fluid on earth--the sweet nectar emitted from the depth of a flower blossom, first hand. Up close and personal, so to speak.

Bee on Blue Flower
Commons.wikimedia.org

As my husband and I have considered becoming apiarists, and have learned more and more about these spectacular and exceedingly necessary creatures, I find myself consistently considering the world from the unique perspective of Apis mellifera, commonly known as the Western Honeybee.

One of the most basic and necessary considerations to make when providing for bees as their keepers is proper food and nutrition for them to produce enough honey to sustain themselves through the winter and, hopefully, even have a bit left over for their loving and devoted keepers. It seems nearly universal for us to want to provide the best nutrition possible for the animals in our care. I have seen people who are hungry and in need forgo proper nutrition for themselves, and even their children, in order to buy the best possible kibble for their loyal and loving dog. While I certainly can't place bees in the 'loyal and loving' category, they have undoubtedly fallen to the 'within our care' category.

The closer we examine the honeybee,

the more we realize the workings of a beehive

encompass territories

beyond our comprehension.

--Leo Tolstoy

The need for backyard beekeepers has never been greater as the feral honeybee population in North America has recently become virtually non-existent. Today's honeybees have met with a barrage of barriers to completing their seemingly simple mission of collecting food for themselves and their young. Pollinators are some of the few beings on Earth that provide for themselves and their offspring without harming the organism that provides their sustenance. They are, in fact, not only beneficial to their food source, but absolutely necessary to the production of most of the fruits and vegetables that we, as humans, consume. Bees carry the pollen of the thousands of flowers they visit on their gathering excursions, fertilizing as they go, and providing necessary, life sustaining, genetic diversity. 

Covered in Pollen
Source: Rogue

Modern agricultural practices, which favor monocultures, have created a "green desert" of crops that cover mile after mile of fertile land that once supported a vast variety of wildflowers, the primary food source for feral honeybees. These crops, while necessary for human consumption, do not provide adequate food for bees, and many pesticides and fungicides, once thought to be 'safe' for bees, have recently been discovered to have an array of devastating side effects for bees and other necessary pollinators as well as their offspring. These factors, along with the infection of a parasitic Varroa mite, are causing a disturbing phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder, a condition where all of the adults in a hive will fly off and abandon brood (their young) and honey, and most unusual of all, their queen, never to return.

Colony Collapse Disorder

A recent study of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)  has revealed that bees are consuming a veritable buffet of pesticides and fungicides in the pollen that they collect from wild and domestic plants alike. GMO "Pesticide Ready" plants like corn crops transfer their neurotoxic chemicals via the pollen that bees gather to feed to their larvae. Even if the pesticides do not kill bees directly, the chemicals weaken the colony, which functions as a collective and is, genetically, an expansive replica of the queen herself.

This weakening, paired with diminishing food supplies, has proved a deadly combination for our most proficient of pollinators. Bees are unable to stand up to the the onslaught of stressors they are faced with as they attempt to adapt to a chemical-laden modern world. 

In many past civilizations, bees have been considered messengers; harbingers of truths revealed only to those who watched them closely and paid close enough attention to understand them. Bee Charmers have been revered throughout history, in many cultures world wide. Honey has been considered only fit for royal consumption: The Nectar of the Gods, (or, more accurately: Goddesses, certainly in the case of bees!) much like the paths of chocolate and coffee. 

Through more modern science, we have come to understand that bees have the ability to navigate, and can communicate complicated navigational messages via their scent and behavior. They are able to convey complex ideas like direction and location and to act upon those instructions, for the good of the hive. When I came to understand this, I had to ask myself: 

If bees are messengers, 

what is the message? 

When I came to the inevitable answer to that question, my next question simply had to be: 

How Can I Help?

This question, and, perhaps even more, its rather grim inevitable answer, led my husband and me to the decision to keep bees on our property in Colorado. We understand the seemingly insurmountable issues facing our world's bee population, and therefore our own food source, and we have decided to do what we can to help. 

Girl Holding Bee
Click here to help me source

As an early step in our preparation for the spring arrival of our bees, we have made an effort to observe our home landscape through an entirely different lens than we are accustomed to as we attempt to assure our new inhabitants a safe and adequate food source on our property.

Here on the high, windy Colorado prairie, mostly grasses are native. The prairie that develops at this elevation, longitude and latitude is a Mid-grass prairie as opposed to the tall grass prairies of more humid climates, where grasses can reach 7 feet high and more, or a short grass prairie, which comes with less rainfall and scrubbier landscape. We love watching the grasses on our prairie wave like wind on water, undulating in green-brown waves, reaching for the endless ice blue sky. 

Hollyhock

Grasses are a truly spectacular food source for domestic ungulates like cattle and horses. Huge wild Bison herds once thrived on the protein rich grains ripe grasses provide. Both our native antelope herd and our local migratory deer herds, and even the herd of domestic (?) yaks that lives down the road, feed on the grasses as well as the grains that the grasses produce. While grasses are an excellent food source for all of these animals, all of which are either domestically grown or hunted for their meat (and in the case of the yaks, their milk and fiber as well), grasses are not nearly as perfect a food source for the honeybee or for other pollinators. We began to understand that, if we want to keep bees and feed them, we need to provide for them in the form of the food that is best for them:

 Flowers!

In order to do this, we have changed our land-management practices to accommodate a creature on whom we all depend.  We are growing plants and planting trees with an eye on what will provide the most benefit to bees.

And we are doing as much of it as we can 

from seed.