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| 05/20/2008: "Bee love"
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I love bees. Years ago I maintained several honeybee hives, and I miss the little buggers: what an utterly fascinating hobby! I even sold some surplus honey for a while, mainly to a baker in his 70s at the time (early 1980s) who had coincidentally been born in Bethel, Alaska-- my old hometown.
It's been widely publicized that domestic honeybees face serious challenges of late: between varroa mites and "colony collapse disorder" among other things, life is much more problematic for the casual as well as the professional beekeeper. One of these years when fewer distractions loom, perhaps I'll confront such challenges and resume the hobby. Sure hope so!
In the meantime, there are many other bee species to be nurtured: hundreds of them. These beneficial insects are critical to our environment, particularly for their tireless and indispensable work pollinating our food crops. We can all do more to invigorate bees by planting a wide variety of flowering plants and avoiding pesticide use, as well as providing suitable habitat in other ways.
For instance, you can construct bee houses in much the same manner as birdhouses-- short video of bees using a house here. Many native bees are adapted to nesting in hollow-stemmed plants, and bee houses can be built by bundling tubes of bamboo or other material in rain-sheltered spots, or drilling appropriately-sized holes in blocks of wood and situating them attractively. I've been meaning to build several of these for some time, so imagine my chagrin at the following scenario:
I bought a huge pile of bamboo earlier this spring, and stacked it horizontally in the Swamp Shack's open-air garage safe from rainfall. This morning I went out and rummaged in the pile, moving a stack here and a stack there... presently there came a buzzing, and I was aware of several bees hovering in the immediate area, darting this way and that as if searching for... oh no.
I suddenly realized that they'd already scouted out spots in the open ends of some of the bamboo poles, and were confused by the rearrangement. --Guilt!
These were not honeybees, of course: they're solitary native bees of just the sort that deliberately-built houses might attract. Needless to say, I'm gonna get on the stick (har) and make some dedicated beehouses right away. There's obviously heavy demand in the bees' current real-estate market, unlike some others we could name.
In the meantime I actually feel bad about moving any more poles-- what's a bee empath to do?
As a postscript, don't get me started about the ridiculous paranoia so many people hold for bees. True bees aren't in the least aggressive toward humans in normal circumstances, and when some idiot is frantically waving his arms at the church picnic while shouting Aaaaugh-- a bee! -- 99% of the time it's actually a yellowjacket of some stripe, to use the common parlance. Rule of thumb: if a single "bee" seems to be deliberately harassing and aggressively buzzing around you, it ain't a bee. They have more constructive things to do.
We'll be back with more on this later. --rbee
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