Spring                                                                 Full Bee Hiving Moon

A full day of bees.  Mostly fun, but sitting for 8 hours just doesn’t have the appeal it used to.  What appeal was that?  Can’t recall.

The info on bee diseases and, again, the multi-valent character of colony collapse disorder keeps getting clearer.  Repetition is useful for this old brain. (I think a companion piece to This Old House could be This Old Brain)  The big problem is varroa mites.  Marla said the bees would have developed adequate resistance to the mites if they had been left untreated, as they have been in Africa, for example, but our wealthier, fix-it-now culture insists on medicine.  The result?  We have resistant varroa mites that are much more difficult to control.

The mites per se are not so much the issue; rather, they weaken the bees through sucking their vital fluids and serving as a vector for any number of bee viruses. This reinforces a long list of other interrelated negatives.  Lost pasturage in clover–reduced by adding fertilizer and decreasing crop rotation, different management practices for cutting alfalfa that reduce its bloom time, increasing pesticide use which further weakens the bees, herbicide use that kills bee friendly native plants (often called weeds) and the prevalence of monocultural planting of key ag crops like corn, wheat, beans create a dark synergy, a whirl of problematics that chip away at healthy bee populations, both native and domesticated.

A rolling loss of genetic diversity, an extinction event with no peer in the geologic record,* characterizes our impact, mostly intentional, on the landscape.  In making incremental decisions concerning agricultural methods, population, urbanization and our hungry, rapidly increasing demand for energy we have added co2 to the atmosphere, cut down forests, built farms in important watersheds (see the Mississippi and the Minnesota rivers as poster children for why this is a problem.), delinked corridors for wild animal travel and increased our dependence on smaller and smaller gene pools.  As the patenting of seed corn, wheat and rice, to give three important examples, has concentrated ownership of important food seed stores, the resistance to disease which has kept these key sources of human nutrition vital, decreases.

I mention this last because it is easy to see the bridge between our behavior in general and such problems as colony collapse disorder.  There are, thankfully, many solutions to these problems, but we have to have the will to act.  How many people will grow their own vegetables or participate in Community Supported Agriculture?  How many farmers will turn toward less intensive, and therefore less productive, farming methods in a time when larger farm sizes seem the only route to financial success?  The solutions all seem to lie in a spectrum of activities that support bio-diversity, emphasize sustainable energy and food production and reduce our reliance on steroid-like chemicals such as fertilizers.

The diverse pathways to a positive future give me hope.  Each of us can do a bit:  consume less gas, make our homes more energy efficient, grow some of our own food, patronize local suppliers, recycle.  We can also encourage systemic change in sectors like energy production, agriculture, urban development, defense and foreign policy.  Perhaps it’s time for a JFK moment:  Ask not what Mother Earth can do for you, but what you can do for Mother Earth.

*The background level of extinction known from the fossil record is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria, and fungi, not just the large vertebrates we are most familiar with). In contrast, estimates based on the rate at which the area of tropical forests is being reduced, and their large numbers of specialized species, are that we may now be losing 27,000 species per year to extinction from those habitats alone.