Just Let It Bee

Have you ever been eyeball to eyeball with a passionate scientist? You will find it hard to forget. I made the mistake of asking my niece, a research scientist with a double doctorate, about her research on bees at our last family reunion. I got an earful. She had nothing but scorn for the Save the Bees movement. It turns out honey bees are actually bad guys. Killers. Oops. The first thing apis meliferra does in a new environment, my niece told me, is to search out and wipe out the local competition.

It turns out the ones that we gardeners should be worried about are the mason bees, bumble bees, solitary bees, sweat bees, tickle bees — and many other native wild pollinators. As far as crop pollination, guess what, our native guys were already doing the job just fine without the sticky invaders from the east.

But who am I to point fingers? The honey bee came over with the rest of us Euro-trash, enslaved to our appetites, to provide that lovely sweetness that we all adore. Honey bees are take-over kind of animals… like the European colonists that transported them.

Which is why every time I see “save the honey bees” slogans this I have this “ouch” feeling — that this is yet another example of well-intentioned, zealous half-knowledge. A groundswell of compassionate and passionate planet-savers gone wrong. But then is it actually compassion? Let’s face it, if those European upstarts didn’t make HONEY…would anyone be all fired up enough to sell warm yellow merch?

I love complexity. It’s beautiful to me. The idea that there are layers of insect civilizations doing their jobs, unknown and unseen by most of us buoys up my spirits. How many other things do I not know about what’s happening in my garden? My life? I like to find out how blind I am, and be made to see.

Next summer I am putting in a mason bee house, and building a wildflower garden. All kinds of native plants…which in my area require protection from the deer, since deer selectively eat native plants, instead of eating the pesky plant invaders from foreign parts!… But that’s another story.

Life is rich. Complex. Buzzing.