Credit: pinterest
This is a bee garden too beautiful for words, but the
same ends can be accomplished with a much more
modest beginning.
There can be little doubt that we are
on the wrong track for our own survival.
Here’s a good indication. The
story on CBS that I heard stated that we have lost 80% of our pollinators in
North America in the last 20 years.
Pollinators, for the most part, are bees and butterflies. In real understandable terms, pollinators are
responsible for one out of every three mouthfuls of food we eat. Without them, we cannot produce enough food
to feed ourselves, let alone the rest of the world that we have historically
exported to. Between being on track to
lose crops and potable water supplies from other causes, we all are looking at
the foreseeable day when our children will suffer from both insufficient food
and water.
Beautiful blossoms burst into bloom from new milkweeds
started this year. There are annual milkweeds, but these
are perennials. To tag them as weeds certainly doesn't fit.
I went looking for more data, and the
picture gets more complicated depending on the species of bees or butterflies
we are talking about. For example,
commercial beekeepers lost 44% of their hive populations in one year,
2015-2016. Plus, not all pollinating
bees live in hives. Many species live
their entire lives individually in plants and in the ground, but they also
raise our crops. Their numbers are
estimated to have dropped by 96%, that is 96%, in the same 20 years. Some species are believed to be already
extinct.
This is our small beginning. There are four o'clocks
in the background, orange milkweeds in the middle,
and bee balm in the foreground. As they propagate, we
will continue to transplant further down the swale.
So, what can we do? The current approach is to stop waiting for
our governments to do anything. We could
start a whole on-line battle on what administration is eradicating the EPA,
FEMA, the Food & Drug Administration and so on, and planning to destroy
more efforts to protect food supplies, protect us from pesticides, etc. And, the federal government isn’t the only
problem. Here in Oklahoma, the state is
owned by the oil and gas industry. There
are ongoing problems with fracking, with water quality, with earthquakes, and
too many other problems to get into, but the point is that the state has no
intention of taking any measures to protect our citizens over the desires of
the oil and gas industry’s demands for more tax gifts (otherwise called
incentives), more tax breaks, more land rights, and so on. They just won’t do it. So if we can’t count on the federal
government, and we can’t count on the state government, where do we turn? The answer to that is the current move underway
to get every homeowner to make a difference individually. Here’s an example.
The four o'clocks are going gang busters. They reseeded
from plants we had there last year. The pollinators
love them.
We have a small swale (little gully
or ravine) that runs down our back yard.
It is a mess to mow, and serves no useable function in our yard or
lawn. We are turning it into a bee and
butterfly garden. People are being encouraged
to turn small tracts of ground into feeding stations for bees and
butterflies. Most people are familiar
with the monarch butterfly, for example.
Twice a year, they migrate from between 3,000 and 5,000 miles to get
between their summer and winter ‘homes’, with the difference in distance
depending on starting and finishing points.
No single butterfly survives to make the entire trip. Four different generations will be born,
breed, hatch, and die before the great, great, grandchildren reach their
destinations. They feed and pollinate
along their flight paths as they move.
Between insecticides, human lack of understanding, and loss of habitat,
the monarchs are losing the ability to find enough food to keep going. Our part comes in not understanding that many
plants are essential, and spraying to kill anything that is not lawn destroys
vital biodiversity. Milkweed, for
example, has been widely eradicated for this reason, and milkweed is what
monarchs almost exclusively feed on.
People are being asked to dedicate poor areas of property, fence lines,
back corners of yards, or fields not being actively used, to natural regions
where they establish plants that are of value to bees, hummingbirds, ladybugs, and
butterflies. It reduces the property
owner’s maintenance costs and time, provides critical plants for nature, and
can be beautiful. Many people think such
an ignored area will look ratty, unattractive.
However, there are many plants that bloom for most of the summer, are
beautiful, and like milkweed, for example, come in a wide range of colors and
growing patterns. Many folks call these
areas bee gardens. Here is one small
link to explain this idea, but once you get started looking, you will find
hundreds of such sites, and pictures of beautiful, not ratty, bee gardens. They can vary between ‘left to nature’ and
exquisitely fancy. Please get hooked on
this effort and jump right in.
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