Where have all the bees gone?

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about honeybees and watching documentaries on television about their disappearance, and it’s really pretty frightening. I’ve never liked yellow jackets and wasps, but I know that honeybees and bumblebees are necessary for pollination of our crops. But after reading an article in the “Oregonian” newspaper, it sounds like the Franklin bumblebee has become extinct without anyone realizing it. I know that this spring and summer I didn’t see one bumblebee which I found quite unusual at the time. Now I learn that they are gone . . . as in forever gone. Bumblebees are responsible for pollinating an estimated 15 percent of all the crops grown in the United States, particularly those raised in greenhouses. Why didn’t we notice this earlier and where did they go?

Now after watching two television programs on the honeybee, I learn that they are also on the way out. This year they have been infected with what is being called Colony Collapse Disorder which sounds like something you’d tell your psychiatrist about if you were feeling down. But it’s about bees. They’re leaving their hives overnight and completely disappearing. No one can find any trace of them once they are gone. In autopsies they find signs of insecticides, mites, and all sorts of things, but nothing that could be causing their complete sudden disappearance. Bees can travel three miles from their hives and find their way back to their own hives, but whatever the disease is could be causing a loss of sense of direction which would make them lost and unable to return. Another thought was that if the bees are contaminated, they are contaminating their hives and moving out or dying from it. Three quarters of all plants in the world require pollination, and this is happening all over the world. One third of all the food we eat depends on the honeybee, and they say the future of our food supply rests on the tiny honeybee.

In one of the programs on television, it described the bee situation in a province in China. All the honeybees have “flown the coop” and they are now hand-pollinating their pear trees. It showed them mixing up some male pollen from the blooms – I don’t know how they know which bloom is male, but they do – and then brushing a feather duster-type stick with feathers or something similar on the end around in the pollen. Then they go to each bloom in the pear tree and brush the gathered pollen into the bloom. It showed pear trees with many, many blooms and all having to be hand-pollinated. It’s hard to believe that could be done, but apparently it is in China. The pears looked beautiful.

It makes me wonder if we’ll be forced to do the same thing pretty soon. I hand-pollinated Audrey III, my tomato plant I grew in my computer room this summer, and it worked out quite well. I’ve had many tomatoes, most of which looked like mutants, but at least they grew and I ate them. I wonder if I should consider hiring out as a pollinator to different farmers next year. I can’t imagine many people volunteering for that kind of work, but
I’ve had experience. Maybe we could round up some illegals and I could be their mentor or foreman . . . whatever you want to call it. I would expect to be paid, of course. My dad used to have bee hives brought in each year to our farm, and I don’t think I realized at the time why he was doing something like that. I know now it was so we would have some food later on down the line. I don’t have references as I’m the only person for whom I’ve worked, but the picture above is of two of my tomatoes. I think it’s pretty cool!