The Nature of Things

For years we've been hearing about problems facing bees, especially honeybees. There is colony collapse disorder, mites, pesticides, in addition to all the predators and disease which the little insects have to face. It is daunting to say the least and bee populations have been declining drastically year after year. Well, now I have some anecdotal evidence to add to that sad litany. My garden has always been visited by lots of bees, both native bees and honeybees. In past years, there have been hundreds, thousands even, of honeybees buzzing around the yard on a hot summer day, sipping from flowers, lining up around the edges of the birdbaths to get water, or crowding onto my inefficient hummingbird feeder to gather the drips of sugar water that leak out. I don't know where they came from; perhaps there was a neighbor who was a beekeeper or they may have been bees that had gone feral, but they were present in great numbers. This is a picture from last year when there were plenty...

Planning your spring garden? Spare some thought for the pollinators. Here are some plants that you can include in your garden to help them. Even if your garden is only a few pots on a patio, consider planting a few of these plants. The bees and butterflies will thank you.

The Bee: A Natural History by Noah Wilson-Rich My rating: 4 of 5 stars The argument could be and has been made that bees are essential to life on Earth as we know it. They are most certainly crucial to the reproduction and diversity of flowering plants. The creatures are known to pollinate more than 130 fruit, vegetable, and seed crops that we rely on to survive and those plants make economic contributions in the tens of billions of dollars every year. Therefore, it is very important on many levels that we have a healthy population of bees. But bees are in trouble. They are dying off at an alarming rate, and although in some cases the cause of the die-off has not been absolutely pinned down, scientists are pretty much in agreement that pesticides and the practices of modern agriculture are the main culprits. In The Bee: A Natural History , Noah Wilson-Rich explores some of the challenges faced by bees and how we can ameliorate them in order to aid the bees. This book primarily focuses...

When the redbud trees are in bloom, they are pollinator magnets. Bees, hummingbirds, butterflies, and other pollinators all love these little flowers, but it seems that bees love them most of all. Bees of all kinds, both native bees and honeybees, respond to the call of the blossoms. Most of the time, all these different pollinators feed together in perfect harmony, but yesterday I observed what appeared to be a battle between two bees - although quite honestly most of the "battling" seemed to be on one side. A large carpenter bee - big black bee - was feeding peacefully on the blossoms when a bumblebee seemed to take exception to his presence. He buzzed the other bee and bumped into him, seemingly trying to dislodge him from the flowers. (The carpenter bee is on the left, bumblebee on right.) The angry buzzing and bumping went on for several minutes. Meanwhile, the carpenter bee seemed totally oblivious and continued placidly enjoying his visit to the flowers. Finally, the b...

I remember a song from my childhood called "Apple Blossom Time." It was a big hit, I think, for the female trio that sang it, the Andrews Sisters. I thought about that song when I looked at my apple tree this morning and now I've had the tune stuck in my head all day. Although the song lyric speaks of May as being "apple blossom time," March is definitely that time here in Southeast Texas. My old Ein Schmer apple tree is sanguine about late winter in our part of the world and so it is holding back some of its buds. It will open them slowly over the next week or so, thus just in case there is a late freeze, it won't lose all of its blossoms. It will still have more buds to open when the weather warms again. The bees are very happy about these blossoms. Both the honeybees and the native bees have been busy today visiting the apple blossoms and the blueberry blossoms that are open. The blueberries are much more profligate with their blossoms, more trusting...

Olivia Judson has a great piece in The New York Times today about the sex lives of plants. Plants, just like the rest of us, have, over millions of years, worked out strategies of sex and reproduction that successfully perpetuate their kind, but, as Judson points out, the plants' sex lives come with some unique obstacles. The most obvious obstacle is that the plant can't move around to find another of its kind to hook up with and so it has to depend on intermediaries. Flowers are the plants' vehicle for delivering their sperm and egg cells to the appropriate recipients and they essentially have two ways of getting those precious bits of matter to combine and make a new plant. One of their allies in reproduction is the wind. It is a bit quirky and unpredictable it is true, but about ten percent of flowering plants do use the wind to spread their pollen. Since the wind goes its own way and is a bit unreliable, wind-pollinated plants tend to produce huge quantities of pol...