Where are the bees?

On my property in rural Maine I have several fruit bearing trees and bushes including apple, cherry, crabapple, and 4 highbush blueberry bushes.  The disturbing thing that happened this year is not one of those trees bore fruit this year!  Not a single blueberry, apple or cherry!  My blueberry bushes normally produce a huge crop, sufficient for me to produce 30 or more jars of blueberry jam that my friends and neighbors really enjoy.  Not this year!  I haven't noticed any bees in my gardens this year, just a few bumblebees and the occasional hummingbird that also serve as pollinators.

Not many Americans know that honeybees are not native to the United States.  European honeybees were brought over centuries ago and they are the primary pollinators of our food crops now.  However mason bees are native to the United States, these are solitary bees that are up to 100 times more effective pollinators.  They are small, benign, will and really hard workers.  

I did a blog post about mason bees a while back and have encouraged them on my property by building special mason bee houses for them.  Sadly, they have not been using the house that I installed this year.

mason bee house

I would encourage you to purchase or build a mason be house if you have a rural property and/or a large garden or fruit trees.  If you're not part of the solution then your part of the problem!

This is deeply disturbing and I've talked to a number of neighbors here in rural Maine who say the same thing has happened to them.  Without bees we have no food.  Bees pollinate about 70% of all the foods that we eat!  Farmers rent honeybee hives to pollinate their crops, but due to honeybee colony collapse they are less available for these important jobs.  The collapse is mostly attributed to pesticides and the broad misuse of them in agriculture.  

if you were alive in the 60s and 70s you may remember going on family vacations and having to wipe all the dead bugs off the front of the car and windshield.  These days I hardly ever see dead bugs on my vehicle.  This is also deeply concerning since insects are at the bottom of the food chain for the whole planet.

As the climate crisis accelerates faster than climatologists can calculate - we are seeing sweeping changes in the ecology of the planet.  Some experts are predicting that in the foreseeable future food shortages and the climate crisis will be driving mass migrations of refugees.  This already happened in Syria in 2006-9 when farming collapsed due to prolonged drought and Syrian refugees moved up into Europe.  The problem is we don't have another planet to go to so we have to figure this out somehow.

So what can we do?

• stop using pesticides, particularly on large lawns and gardens
• install mason bee houses 
• support organic agriculture that do not use pesticides