Rosemary's blue, dilly-dilly. The rosemary beside the back deck is covered with tiny blue blossoms. Very pretty. As delightful as the aroma of rosemary in the tea in my teacup, at my elbow as I write this.
But something is missing from this photo. I haven't seen the bees this spring, and I'm wondering what's happened to them. When the rosemary blooms, they're usually right here, pollen buckets at the ready, eager to dive into those blossoms.
Where are the bees? Where are they? Come on, girls, it's time to go to work!
My bee-anxiety was not diminished when I read about a nationwide bee die-off. Colonies of bees all over the country are dying, and nobody knows what's causing it. Pesticide, perhaps? An unidentified virus?
I don't know of any commercial beekeepers in this part of Burnet County, and I've always assumed that the bees I see in my garden are wild bees. So now I'm wondering whether this new, catastrophic colony decline is mirrored in the wild population, at least in this part of Texas.
Bill and I used to keep honeybees, years ago--our girls, we called them--but we gave it up when the Africanized bees began to move into the Central Texas area, colonizing hives. We didn't want to try to cope. But we still love the bees, love to watch their comings and goings, their diligence and devotion to duty. I watch bees attentively, with curiousity and care and concern--not because I'm a honey lover (although I am) but because I know what unsung heroines these creatures are, how much they do for us and how little we understand their role in our human affairs. And having been a beekeeper myself, I've kept track of the problems beekeepers have--attacks by the varroa mite and takeovers by African queens.
But these problems mainly affect colony bees, honeybees, and not the wild bees. Is the die-off of 2007 affecting them, as well?
I'm sorry to add to your list of things to worry about (heaven knows we have plenty of them), but picture this. Grocery shelves without honey. Apples, cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, watermelons, peaches--without pollinators. Annual plants in your garden without fertile seeds for next year's crop of volunteers. "Agronomists estimate that Americans owe one in three bites of food to bees," I read just this morning. One in three bites! It's a reminder of how intimately we are all related, how profoundly we are connected in the warp and weft of the natural world--and how much we depend on creatures that are usually beneath our notice.
We need to notice. It's probably too early in the year for you Northerners to begin looking for bees. But if you live in the Southern tier of states, you'd start to notice them along about now, wouldn't you? Go out and look in your garden. I hope you'll see bees.
Reading note:
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
--Emily Dickinson
The revery alone may have to do, Emily.