A Bee Plus Garden…
…equals an A + garden.
It’s serious…they have named a disorder after it. Colony Collapse Disorder (when ever scientist can’t figure out a cause for something they use the descriptor ‘disorder’) or CCD. We’re talking honey bees here. For some unexplained reason over the last 2 years, 25% of the western honey bee population has disappeared. Entire honey bee colonies have died off. There are many theories – use of toxic pesticides and herbicides; the introduction of genetically modified crops (hmmm, canary in the coal mine?); industrial agriculture’s penchant for planting acres and acres of the same thing (I think of it as ‘monoculture disorder’); parasites, viruses and mites.
Why should we care? You might think – “eh, I don’t even like honey so, whatever.” But wait – those busy bees are busy pollinating so you can enjoy over 100 different fruits and vegetables -In fact, over 1/3 of our food supply! In terms of dollars – bees help produce $15 billion in crops each year! To learn more, check out this very educational short video.
But honey bees aren’t the only ones buzzing from flower to flower. Honey bees were originally imported from Europe and there was a time when native wild bees did most of the work – well, along with butterflies, humming birds, wasps and many other critters. We just have to diversify the plantscape to attract these native workers back into our gardens and fields.
One way to ensure an abundance and diverse pollinator population is to grow plants that attract these pollinators to your garden. Some of these plants will be your fruit trees and veggies but also various decorative flowering plants. Diversity is key so that you have something flowering in succession most of the year.
We’ve been slowly incorporating more pollinator friendly plants – dill, sunflowers, fennel and lavender to name a few but as we plan our future plantings we’ll take info from Dr. Gordon Frankie’s wonderful site and add various pollinators into the mix.
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