Plant Flowers, Help Bees

To bees, a sweeping lawn, parks, and golf courses look like deserts, writes Thor Hanson in Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees. Without pollen from flowers, bees cannot survive and neither can people without the pollination bees provide for many food crops. Of the 20,000 different species of wild bees, some 40% are in decline or threatened with extinction. Domestic bees suffer from lost habitat, parasites, pesticides, and diseases picked up when transferred from farm to farm.

After "colony collapse" began to cause hive losses, dangers to bees and ways to help them often have been covered in previous posts:

• Bumble Bees Have Special Needs
• Don't Take Food for Granted
• World's Food Supply Needs Bees and Bees Need Help
• Be Kind to Bees
• The Bees and the Birds

Don't Take Food for Granted

We all agree we need food to live. Drought in Africa and hurricanes in Haiti endanger lives. When the sunny, warm weather of June replaced May's surplus rainfall, Wisconsin't "Fabulous Farm Babe," Pam Jahnke, had good news for her radio audience: corn planting was 91% complete; soybean planting, 73% complete; and oats planting, 96% complete. Potato, pasture, alfalfa, and hay conditions also were coming along well.

     Besides the right amount of sun and rain, food crops require pollination and freedom from damaging pests and disease. The trouble is the neonicotinoid pesticide and glyphosate herbicide that crops, such as corn, soybeans, and alfalfa, have been genetically modified to survive cause bee pollinators and the milkweed wildflowers butterfly pollinators eat to die. Research indicates almonds, strawberries, peaches, avocados, and up to 140 crops depend on pollination. The cross-purpose of treating crops to resist pests and disease by killing the bee and butterfly pollinators many crops need to survive requires a major research solution.

     Monsanto, the seed and chemical company criticized for playing a role in every study that claims genetically modified crops are safe, donated a $10 million biotech lab facility to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in January, 2017. The installation's 28,000 square foot space accommodates 20 greenhouses and controlled environments in shade houses and light rooms that enable the university to do research on a scale with major companies. Although there has been no mention of studying the impact on bees of treating Monsanto's corn and soybean seeds with neonicotinoids or of creating plants that do not attract the insects that can destroy them, these would be excellent projects for what has been named the university's new Wisconsin Crop Innovation Center.

     Meanwhile, small scale farmers are in a position to plant crop seeds, untreated by neonicotinoid insecticide; to grow bee- and butterfly-friendly flowers (colorful zinnias, cosmos, and lavender), milkweed, and herbs; to leave woody debris and leaf litter undisturbed for bee breeding areas; and to avoid applying pesticides and herbicides to blooming flowers, weeds, and possible bee nesting areas.

      Finally, research suggests gardeners who want to discourage mosquitoes from ruining their outdoor activities should plant marigolds, citronella, lavender, basil, and catnip (mint).

Be Kind to Bees

With the planting season about to begin in the Northern Hemisphere, this is a good time to look at the health of bees, those little pollinators that some call nature's migrant farmer force. Pollination of California's 90 million almond trees, for example, depends on almost 1,600 beekeepers from everywhere in the US who bring their hives to the state every February. Nathan Clarke, who owns Mad Urban Bees in Wisconsin, loads 2,400 hives into semi trailers for the westward trip each year. The revenue from pollinating crops, not only almonds but also other fruits and vegetables, can be as much as two times more than the income selling honey to consumers and beer brewers. Plus, US beekeepers face competition from low cost honey imports.

     While bee health benefits from leaving harsh winter climates for warmer areas, healthy bees can be infected when they mingle with sick ones when they pollinate away from home. Then, they continue to transmit disease to healthy bees when they return home. But disease is not the only threat to bees and beekeepers. By limiting crops to corn, alfalfa, and soybeans that have been genetically modified to be pesticide-resistant, farmers use chemicals that only kill the weeds that provide pollen for bees and the bees themselves, if these pesticides are sprayed while bees are pollinating in the area. To support their bees, beekeepers find it necessary to provide their own flowerbeds and weeds where their bees can find pollen.

      During the past ten years, researchers have identified causes of the bee colony collapse that began around 2006. Pollinator protection plans have given homeowners, gardeners, farmers, and beekeepers a list of ways to help bees survive:

• To provide bees with pollen and nectar, plant a diverse array of colorful zinnias, cosmos, and lavender; milkweed and other wildflowers; and herbs, such as mints, oregano, garlic, chives, and parsley. Because they have been modified by breeders, tulips, daffodils, petunias, and roses do not feed bees.
• Bees need a place to nest in messy woody debris and in leaf litter and bare soil.
• To keep pesticides away from what bees might eat or where they might nest, remove dandelions and clover before spraying and do not apply pesticides to blooming plants and possible nesting areas.

Neonicotinoid pesticides that weaken pollinators' immune system abilities to survive mites and diseases seem to be a major cause of colony collapse. Not only does spraying fields and urban areas with the pesticides leave bees no safe place to hide in the immediate area, but dust kicked up by applying pesticides spreads neonicotinoids far afield to the dandelions and clover that bees eat in early spring. Since chemical companies have been able to gain exemptions to labeling and regulations, consumers may not always be able to avoid purchasing neonicotinoid pesticides or plants and seeds treated with these chemicals. Corn and soybean seeds, for example, can be coated with neonicotinoid pesticides to protect young plants when they are most vulnerable. Research has shown, however, that treating soybeans has little value because the pesticide is not timed to provide protection during major pest attacks.

     For additional thoughts about problems bees encounter and ways to help them survive, see the earlier post, "The Bees and the Birds." 

Can Small Farms End Poverty?

Before performers, men, women and young people gather, at the Global Citizen Festival in New York City's Central Park on September 26, for the purpose of ending extreme poverty, let's look at a few of the factors contributing to world hunger. Silo thinking, where everyone focuses on their own problems and solutions, is undermining the need to feed and employ people, provide export revenue from agriculture, and protect the environment.

     Small farms provide employment that prevents a country's rural population from flocking to urban areas that are not ready to provide sufficient jobs, sanitation, housing, transportation, and education. David Hoyle, deputy director of ProForest has pointed out how small farms would benefit from governments willing to engage in land-use planning. What governments need to do is designate specific areas where: 1) villagers can farm and live, 2) concessions are leased to large scale export producers of, for example, palm oil and timber, and 3) forested areas needed to sop up greenhouse gases are protected. Water use planning to prevent pollution and supply sufficient water for sanitation, cooking, and crops is also necessary.

     Without land-use planning, plantations governments are counting on to provide agricultural export revenue are in constant competition and conflict with local farmers. Moreover, plantation owners need government help to provide the housing and sanitation facilities, schools, and clinics that are a constant source of complaints by the laborers they employ.

     Countries have tried to coordinate local production and crop exports by providing villagers with fertilizer, seeds, technical assistance, and credit. In exchange, under contract state-owned enterprises buy, at fixed prices, what the farmers produce. As earlier posts for Nigeria, coffee, and cocoa reveal, this process has been financially unsuccessful to both governments and small growers. Modifications have led governments to provide farmers with vouchers they can use to buy their own supplies, and private companies or coops have taken over the task of buying commodities from farmers.

     Chemical companies in a position to perform research for the precision farming that provides seeds, fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides adapted to local soil and climate conditions in global areas of extreme poverty now concentrate their efforts on profitable corn, soybean, and cotton crops important to American agriculture, not, for example, cassava, which feeds the poor in sub-Saharan Africa.

     Instead of engineering crops to provide added vitamins and minerals to first world consumers, in areas of extreme poverty the same objective could be achieved by introducing small farmers to new crops they could plant and bring to their local markets. Not only would a greater variety of produce improve nutrition, but crop rotation could improve soils and increase a farmer's income. Farmers might save money by controlling weeds with mulch rather than chemicals, and they may even be able to make additional money by using weeds to weave baskets (see baskets for sale at serrv.org) or make bio-fuel.

(Farming topics also are covered in the earlier posts, "World (Food) Expo, Hybrid Crops & New Farming Practices" and "Back to the Land.")

Personal Response to the World's Problems

Some effort is better than none. Asked if we are alone in the universe, former NASA astronaut, Barbara Morgan, responded in Time magazine (July 6-12, 2015), "In every crack in the sidewalk, there's something growing....Life seems to want to take hold...." Last year about this time, one bucket of ice water dumped over a person's head helped hope take hold for people suffering from ALS by raising $94 million to find a cure (See the earlier blog post, "Good Works Multiply Fast.")

 Learn that Nestle is filling the plastic water bottles it sells with ground water pumped out of drought-stricken, fire-prone California's San Bernardino National Forest. An even bigger problem: Why would someone in a developed country which has strict health and safety regulations to keep water free of pesticides and pollution drink water transported in plastic bottles from another country?
Response: Fill reusable bottles with water from taps or pumps in areas where water is protected by clean water acts.

Learn that nearly 800 million people in the world don't have enough to eat every day.
Response: Bring a can of soup or fruit to a shelter for homeless people, a food pantry, or church collection center.

Learn that usable items are thrown away in dumps that pollute the land and pose health risks for children tempted to play in them.
Response: Hold a yard sale to sell outgrown clothes and toys. Maybe, even give the proceeds of the sale to a charity.

Learn that a "religious" terrorist group has used a bomb to hurt people it doesn't like.
Response: Read the Barron's book series, This is my faith, or another children's book on religions to find out the true beliefs of Muslims, Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. that have nothing to do with violence against those who practice other or no religions.

Learn the drawbacks of drilling for oil in the Arctic (See the earlier blog post, "North Pole Flag."), fracking (See the post, "The Lure of Shale Oil Independence."), and greenhouse gases (See the posts, "Pollution Update" and "A Healthy Environment.").
Response: Walk or ride a bike to reduce the need to be driven in a car that burns gasoline and look for ways to use less electricity from coal-burning power plants. What can you do without turning on a light, computer, or TV?

Learn that pesticides can harm the bees needed to pollinate crops and can reduce the milkweed food supply butterflies need to eat. (See the earlier blog post, The Bees and the Birds ".).
Response: In backyard and community gardens, pull out weeds by hand.

Learn that someone has been hurt or killed because of the color of their skin, where they were born, their religion, who they love, because they are girls, or because they want to vote.
Response: Pray for greater understanding, tolerance, and respect among all people in the world.

The Bees and the Birds

The children catching and releasing fireflies this summer may know they are running after beetles rather than flies or gloworms, and they may be training to protect the world from disease-carrying insects or from dangerous insecticides. While some kids panic at the sight of bees, spiders, and cockroaches, others watch caterpillars walk up their arms and might become the inspectors who keep dangerous insects out of countries or observe, as Rachel Carson did, how deadly an insect repellent like DDT can be.

     Angela Banner, the UK author of the Ant and Bee little board book series, viewed insects as friends. Since the early 1960s, her books have taught children to read, count, and tell time; and to identify animals, colors, and shapes. In the book, Around the World With Ant and Bee, her insects are globe trotters.

     Of course, while some insects are friendly, others carry disease and cause crop damage around the world. As climate change and globalization spread tropical diseases that have become resistant to insecticides, British researchers now have developed genetically modified male mosquitoes that can kill the mosquito larvae of the unmodified females they mate with. To eliminate fungus-causing Dutch Elm disease, it has been necessary to cut down scores of elm trees infected by beetles. And history is filled with stories of the devastation caused by germ-carrying insects. In the Old Testament, the Book of Exodus tells of plagues of mosquitoes, gadflies, and locusts. When children hear about the Black death; the mosquitoes that spread malaria and yellow fever; typhus; the bubonic plague; the tsetse fly that carries sleeping sickness; and lyme disease from ticks, they may want to destroy every ant hill they see. It then may be time to watch The Ant Bully or ANTZ to gain insight into the life of an ant or A Bug's Life" in order to empathize with an ant colony's trouble with grasshoppers. The Beetle Book by Steve Jenkins does what it can to gain respect for beetles.

     Kids can learn to respect the bees, moths, and butterflies that pollinate fruit trees and vegetable and nut plants by carrying the pollen that fertilizes the cells that produce plant seeds. Hives of 25,000 bees were valued at $83,000, when they were stolen in France in 2014. Consequently, it has been a serious problem ever since honey bees suddenly began to suffer colony-collapse disorder in 2006. Time magazine (June 1, 2015) reports that beekeepers lost almost half of their colonies between April 2014 and April 2015.

     To find chemicals to replace the neonicotinoids that kill bees with alternative sprays that control crop damage from other insects has been a challenge. Since new research also suggests the glyphosate chemical in the Roundup herbicide that is an effective weed killer in corn and soy fields has the unfortunate side effect of killing the milkweed monarch butterflies feed on during their migrations to and from Mexico every year, the search for new ways to differentiate between the control of certain insects and weeds and the protection of other endangered insects goes on.

     With as much as almost a quarter of U.S. crops dependent on bee pollination, new hives have appeared in various locations, such as just off a path in the Obrich botanical garden in Madison, Wisconsin, and in the 84-acre campus arboretum at American University in Washington, D.C. In May, 2015 Washington issued a National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators that aims to restore seven million acres of the native flowers that nourish bees

      Normally, hives of honeybees that are native to Europe are rented to farmers when, for example, their apple and cherry crops are in full flower. To foster experimentation with different approaches, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has given a five-year research grant to the Integrated Crop Pollination Project that coordinates the work of government agencies, not-for-profit associations, and private firms. At Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, Dr. Kelly Garbach lists a number of projects being tried. As disease reduces the European honeybee population, native U.S. bee species might be able to pollinate certain crops, either on their own or in combination with traditional honeybees. A Time magazine article, "The Plight of the Honeybee" (August 19, 2013), told how researchers are trying to produce "a more resilient honeybee" by cross-breeding species. One of the reasons native bees have been overlooked is because they are very small, only half the size of European honeybees. Another reason for bee research is changing climate conditions. If bees could live full time in one location, it would be less costly and more advantageous than trying to figure the best time for beekeepers to provide them. Dr. Garbach plans to identify innovators who can mentor others who want to adopt successful new pollination practices.

       In addition to bees, other insects also perform good works. Insects feed birds, and, of course, for thousands of years, silk cloth has been made from the threads that caterpillars use to make their cocoons. Some insects and birds also kill harmful bugs that feed on crops and live stock. Nonetheless, flies, fleas, ticks, lice, and mites can bother and infect animals. Beetles eat fruit trees and potatoes, and in their form as grubs, beetles eat the roots of corn, pasture grass, and strawberries. Children even may have seen clothes that have been damaged by moths and carpet beetles that eat wool.

    Youngsters interested in discovering which insects are helpful and which are harmful can grow up to be the entomologists that control insect pests. Edward O. Wilson, a global expert on ants, has written the book, Letters to a Young Scientist, that will interest and inspire future entomologists. On National Public Radio, Wilson said that he had a childhood love of "creepy-crawly things" and a passion and persistence to be a scientist who studied them. All children who have seen how fast ants appear on picnic tables can make sure they don't attract flies and other disease-carrying insects by leaving food uncovered in the house. Outside, they can make sure to throw food away only in closed garbage bins.

      Farmers know vast fields planted with the same crop attract swarms of the insects that like to feed on that crop. During the early 20th century, boll weevils destroyed millions of dollars worth of the U.S. cotton crop. In their own gardens, youngsters can learn the benefit of cutting down on the attraction of insects by planting a variety of vegetables and flowers. They also might look for, or hope in the future to help develop, plants engineered to be pest-resistant. (For other innovative ideas related to crops, go to the earlier blog posts, "Back to the Land" and "A Healthy Environment.")

     Artists Hubert Duprat and Kathy Kyle know just how good some insects can be. They give little moth-like caddisfly larvae, that protect themselves by constructing armor by "gluing" together gravel, sand, twigs, and other debris, gold flakes, opal, turquoise, rubies, and pearls to make beads that can be strung together into one-of-a-kind necklaces, earrings, key chains, and zipper pulls.

     As a bit more practical matter, children can be on the lookout for standing water that should be drained to keep mosquitoes from breeding. Although only a handful of the world's 80,000 species of mosquitoes bite and transmit diseases, such as malaria, dengue (black bone fever), and chikungunya, these diseases are life threatening. When kids recognize the importance of protecting themselves from mosquito bites by using insect repellent when they go outside and by installing screens to keep mosquitoes out of their homes, they can start thinking about raising money to protect African children with mosquito nets. On the Internet, the key words, "mosquito nets" lead to a number of organizations that need funds to do this job. UNICEF, for example, has an "Inspired Gift" program to provide the world's poorest children with mosquito nets. Kids and adults can find details about this program at my earlier blog post, "Hope for the Future."