Plant Talk

Join this Saturday's bee-a-thon, and be part of a lively nationwide effort to learn about bees, count them, and so save them....and the planet as we know it.

The live-streaming web event is from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the site Your Garden Show. Drop in anytime and sign up at http://www.yourgardenshow.com/bee-a-thon.  The day is devoted to bees, from how they're faring to what you can do to help. Bee experts from all over North American are participating, connected by audio, video and email to answer queries from people who've connected to the site.

Honeybees are the future of plant life on the planet, so who better than gardeners to lead bee conservation efforts- learn how this Saturday....

Mason Bees To the Rescue - With Your Help

I got taken to task, very kindly, by commercial mason bee producer and entrepreneur Dave Hunter after he read my story about pollinator pathways in Pacific Northwest magazine last Sunday (click here to read).

Hunter is working to buffer a pollination crisis he sees coming in the next 5-7 years in the U.S. with the decline of the honeybee. He says that providing plenty of pollen, as I suggested doing in my story, just isn't enough. Mason bees might just be the answer, and gardeners can help by housing and encouraging these non-aggressive, gentle and productive bees in their gardens.  "A long range plan has us reaching out to NW backyard gardeners in 5-7 years and asking for their excess mason bees to be used in Wenatchee and Yakima orchards.  It may be that serious," Hunter writes.

A few facts about the hardworking little mason bee, which fortunately isn't in decline like honeybees:

-The mason bee season starts in March - as the garden comes alive, so do the bees, and are active through May, which is ideal timing to pollinate fruit trees and other early bloomers.

- There are over 130 species of mason bees that use a hole to store their pollen.  The one we’re most familiar with (for now) is the blue orchard bee.

- If you garden organically, have some mud and pollen in your garden, and provide shelter to keep the straws/reeds in which the bees gather and store pollen dry, you can raise mason bees.

See Hunter's website at www.crownbees.com to learn how to successfully house and raise mason bees. Love this - you can not only learn all about mason bees on the web site and order some for your garden (now's the time) but also sign up to get "bee-mail" to remind you of what you need do when to take care of your bees.

 

 

Bee Appreciation

  Right now my garden is filled with happy bees, busily gathering nectar to feed the hive through the winter.  I'm impressed by their industry as I read on a chaise soaking up the slanting, barely-warm enough rays of the sun that signal autumn is fast approaching.

It's worth planting a few late bloomers to keep bees fed through autumn - the most popular flowers in my garden at the moment are sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale) and any kind of sedum, also lavender...all of which seem to vibrate with the concentrated, buzzy eagerness of bees at work.

A bee taking a rest on Clematis roguchi, above and hard at work on the dusty pink flower clusters of Sedum 'Purple Emperor', below.

 

One of the best books I read this summer is Honeybee: Lessons of an Accidental Beekeeper by C. Marina Marchese, a true and personal tale by a graphic artist turned beekeeper who followed her bee lust around the world learning all about bee care, lore and products.  Then I just ran across a web page devoted to bee iconography - take a look at Bees in Art. Who knew we humans evoke bees in so many charming and beautiful ways to encourage their presence and survival? Speaking of, here's my own garden totem to bees and all they accomplish....a mosaic by Vashon artist Clare Dohna, and the cornerstone paver in my garden. My son helped me lay this paver on a cold February morning, and sure enough, it drew a fat, sleepy, grumpy bumblebee out of hibernation to buzz around our heads and land, yes, right on the bee. I took it as a good omen....

 

A Truly Modern Garden Show

Happy Autumnal Equinox tomorrow....as the sun approaches the equator, for a brief moment, our days and nights are balanced at equal length......I'm not feeling so balanced myself, as I'm suffering a visual hangover from seeing so much fascinating art and design over the weekend. We flew into San Francisco Thursday morning (what recession? Not a rental car to be had in the entire city of SF), and rode the bus out to Golden Gate Park to visit the California Academy of Sciences....what an amazing green roof!!

On Friday morning we scored a car, drove to Sonoma, and spent a couple of days at The Late Show Gardens, an open-air, environmentally-inspired garden show. Believe me, this is the garden show of the future...I just hope attendance was high enough to make it financially viable.

After a lovely twilight dinner with all the speakers, artists, designers and show organizers at the home of photographer Saxon Holt on Saturday night...we drove back into the city yesterday to see the Avedon photography exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art...hence the visual over-stimulation. I'll be doing posts all week with photos of the very cool Late Show gardens created by top-notch designers.

I can't tell you how delightful it was to go to an outdoor show, where the light was natural and the gardens actually growing in the ground. Breezes blew through, the light changed, you could hear birds... And these were gardens to experience, not just to look at; many were interactive, with honey to taste, goggles to look through, even a rebounder trampoline to bounce on. You could walk into each garden and experience it in three dimensions.... the show was reasonably sized, only one speaker at a time, and the atmosphere relaxed, participatory, congenial...people sat around in the shade and talked, garden creators and vendors were on hand to chat....speaking of vendors, all were class acts, from Digging Dog and Cistus Nurseries to art by Cevan Forristt and Marcia Donoghue....

Here's Greg and me  in composer and soundscape designer Hugh Livingston's "Garden Party". Everyone walking in to the garden was given a parasol and invited to the party..  Acoustical effects like talking tomato cages and hedges emitting party conversation, as well as life-size figures emanating musical snippets added to the party atmosphere.....

Bay area designer Shirley Watts created a bee-themed garden called "A Garden of Mouthings" complete with honey tastings, bee experts on hand to answer questions, bee friendly plantings and honeycomb-like structures. The dripping honey stools weren't truly sticky....

The Bees are Back?

More bees seem to be buzzing around our gardens this spring, which is a reassuring sign after the scarcity of bees and colony collapse worries last year.  A number of readers have asked if bees are truly making a comeback.....

I sent your questions along to Sharon Coleman, who is an educator with Washington State University Extension Service, and the most knowledgeable person I know about all things bug-related. Here's Sharon's bee-centric answer:

"Bees seem to be doing well.  If honey bees (photo, left) are spotted in the city  then it is likely there is a beekeeper to thank that is nearby.  Bumble bees (below, left) are fuzzy, variously colored with all golden bees, bumbles with yellow faces and reddish rumps, and some yellow and black striped.  They are pretty gentle to work around if you don't annoy a nest.  The shiny blue black bees are the orchard mason bees that live in holes made by beetles and more recently by humans so they will nest in their garden.  There are also solitary nesting bees that nest in the ground or other places rather than communally.  So many bees, so little time."

When I asked if colony collapse is one threat we can put behind us, she referred the question to her colleague Dave Pehling, who writes:

"Still no definite answers about CCD.  I, and many researchers, believe it is a response to a variety of stresses and pathogens.  With Varroa, tracheal mites, viruses, Nosema and keepers moving thousands of beehives around the States, I'm surprised the bees can survive at all.  In addition, some of the miticides that are being used to control pests in the hives apparently build up in the brood comb wax and have been shown to shorten bees' lives and affect brood.  Some of the newer insecticides used in agriculture are believed by some to add to the problem indirectly. "

Dave concludes with, "Perhaps the reason there seems to be an increase in bees and less CCD is that the weakest bloodlines have been eliminated and only the strong hives are reproducing? "

So no definite answers, but cautious optimism....and optimism on any environmental front is so welcome...

If you have more questions:
Sharon J. Collman                                       
425-357-6025                                        
collmans@wsu.edu.