Eating Economically at the Co-op: Bee Mindful!!

More about your yard & local economies

by Ruth Smalley

“Our own yards can help us reduce our incessant pressure on the planet’s health” – Toby Hemenway, Gaia’s Garden

In my last column, I asked you to take a shovel to your lawn, for a number of planetary health reasons. This month, I’d like to address another motive for getting rid of your grass: supporting your local pollinators.

Scientists have long known that pollinator species are in trouble. When Stephen Buchman and Gary Nabhan sounded the alarm in their 1996 book The Forgotten Pollinators, they pointed out that, more than 30 years earlier, Rachel Carson had predicted “fruitless falls” due to habitat fragmentation by “physical destruction and chemical disruption.”

Now, the flurry of articles describing the mysterious disappearance of thousands of domestic honey bee colonies in over 22 states — called Colony Collapse Disorder — are reminding us that we rely on honey bees for one out of every three bites of food. And pollinators of some kind are responsible for three-quarters of all flowering plants. Researchers can’t explain this dramatic die-off, but what is clear is that honey bees (an introduced, European bee species), as well as the many native bees in the United States, are under a variety of stresses, most of them human induced.

Large-scale, managed pollination suffers from many of the same problems inherent in modern industrial agriculture. “We’re stressing them in almost a feedlot situation,” stated one researcher (Sorenson). Entomologist Marla Spivak puts it bluntly: “What’s happening to the bees is symbolic of human stewardship of our Earth and our environment. We keep going for bigger crops and more money, but we’re not taking care of the bees that we need” (Coleman). Parasitic mites wiped out nearly all feral honey bees in the 1990s, and many smaller beekeepers were driven out by the economic challenges of protecting domestic bees from disease while competing with cheap imported honey. Burgeoning monocultures such as California’s halfmillion acres of almond trees, incapable of supporting resident bee populations, increased demand for pollination services, and many large commercial beekeepers became “migratory.” They truck their bees cross-country, breed them for longer pollination seasons, feed their hardworking charges corn syrup, and resort to antibiotics and miticides in their attempts to keep these increasingly stressed insects healthy. Combine this with a warming globe’s unstable weather patterns, loss of “bee pasture” to sprawl, and exposure to lethal or disorienting pesticides and genetically modified crops, and the result is a hostile workplace for bees.

A more complex part of the picture involves native bees — New York is home to more than 400 species. Often more specialized, or more limited in their range and season, native bees nonetheless provide essential pollination services that cannot be replaced by honey bees. Habitat destruction has taken a toll and unfortunately, in some regions, honey bees seem to have actually edged the natives out of the field.

What does all this have to do with your yard or your Co-op shopping practices? Well, even if your yard is too shady for tomatoes, or your summer schedule too erratic for vegetable gardening, some locally grown, hardy perennial flowers will at least provide habitat for pollinators. Purchasing local honey supports the efforts of beekeepers like Lloyd Spear and the Rulison family, whose bees pollinate orchards such as Indian Ladder Farms but are never shipped long distances. Acting with pollinators in mind provides a way to eat economically and shop ecologically.

And, with a little extra effort you can even provide nesting areas for native bees. Check out websites such as Knox Cellars and Bee- Diverse, for ready made nests for orchard mason bees and bumblebees, or make your own from instructions available on the internet. You can even order mason bees online (too late for this season, however) if you are unable to attract any in your neighborhood. So, if you have a lawn, why not transform it into an outpost for biodiversity, and a small offering to the beleaguered bees?

Sources

Buchmann, Stephen L., and Gary Nabhan. The Forgotten Pollinators. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996.

Coleman, Nick. “The plight of the honeybee is one we should all worry about.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, Feb. 27, 2007. Online at www.StarTribune.com/357/story/1029875.html.

Back to index

CoopScoop Home
CoopScoop Archives
Behind the Scoop
Guidelines for Article
     Submission