The Importance of Bees

I think most people "get" the importance of bees. They move from flower to flower, collecting pollen for their honey, but passing the pollen from plant to plant. The bees, just by doing what they do, are vital to the pollination of plants, which makes them vital to the production of food. Whether we are talking about industrial scale food production or just the stuff we grow in our backyard, bees make a huge difference. I knew this before C and I planted our garden, but I'm not sure I full understood just HOW vital the whole pollination part is.

I'm a person who likes to read about the things I'm doing ... how to, wins and losses, general information, etc. The reading on pollination was very interesting. Apparently plants are a lot like humans. Some of them are lone wolves (asexual), and can basically pollinate themselves to produce fruit all on their own. Others are either male or female, and both are required to bring the fruit to maturity. At first I was really worried about whether we'd know which plants were male and which were female. The yellow squash were the first to begin to bloom. They all looked the same! We watched, debated, worried, waited. Well, WE watched, debated, and waited. It was mostly me

who worried. C always had faith we'd figure it out. When the flowers began to open I still didn't feel much better. Until the day one specific squash blossom opened. When that happened, I knew for sure which was which. Note how obvious it is once you see them both. After that we quickly began to notice other differences that I guess didn't stand out to us right away. Suddenly it made so much more sense!

After a lot of reading, and after a lot of watching for bees, we began to be concerned at how few of them we saw. So we kind of took matters into our own hands by doing some pollination by hand. I used tiny little paintbrushes, got out there at the break of dawn to get the new blossoms just as they opened, and did my best to be a bee. I had a different paintbrush for each type of plant.  I then used the paintbrush to collect pollen from the male plants and painted it around on the female plants. I did this with as many of the female blossoms I could catch, but I know that not every blossom was caught.

While the garden worked out well for us, we still worried about how few bees we seemed to have. We'd both heard about Colony Collapse Disorder, and we both understood that we need bees, even if we didn't understand as fully as we do now. Late in the summer we started talking about helping by getting bees. Which meant, if we were serious, we had a LOT to learn. We joined the mailing list and Facebook page for the local beekeepers club, and a couple months ago they sent out an email about a Beginner Beekeeping class. More about that in the next post!