At Home, with the Bees
In which I get Covid and make new friends.
A brief bit of housekeeping: Covid has delayed me a bit, especially in the cooking department, but I’ll be back in your inbox next Tuesday 8/29 with recipes. We’ll be diving into the world of homemade ricotta and I can’t wait!
About three weeks ago, at the beginning of August, my garden was in the throes of late summer productivity. Tomatoes were ripening, zucchini were materializing out of nowhere, and the corn was… very high.
Unfortunately, I also had my first case of Covid. Three years after everyone else, I was finally participating in this collective phenomenon – and spending over a week alone at home. My body was struggling to accomplish the most basic tasks, but my garden didn’t care. It demanded constant attention, and in my compromised state, it felt like a train hurtling off the tracks.
I’m used to being an aggressively productive person and I desperately wanted to have the energy to tackle the harvesting and upkeep required. I called my mother and moaned about all the tasks that absolutely, immediately, needed to be done. She patiently listened and then told me to “go back to bed.” Eventually, I conceded to Covid and admitted that I would have to limit myself to the single, and actually essential task of watering.
I should explain that my urban garden is on the sprawling side: with 9 vegetable beds, a dozen fruit trees, 3 berry patches in different locations, and countless randomly spaced flower beds. On a recent vacation, I drew a watering map for my aforementioned poor mother with no less than 6 “zones”. I planned this garden with the naïve assumption that an irrigation system was right around the corner. Unwilling to pay someone, and equally unwilling to spend time figuring out a task that seemed “boring”, this system had yet to materialize, and I was still hand watering my entire garden.
So that’s what I did. Each day, I forced myself outside on feverish sojourns to water. What was already a slow process got even slower as I lurched around my garden, distractible as a toddler. My attention snagged on every new bug and every bird sound, so much so that I often completely forgot why I had come outside in the first place.
I was particularly taken with my bees. One evening, I spotted a metallic green bee with bright yellow legs hanging out on my rudbeckia. I took about 20 pictures and then abandoned my hose to look it up in my bee book. I watched tiny bees explore my strawflowers by methodically walking the perimeter of the flower’s center. I took in which of my plants were most popular; in a shocking upset, the anise hyssop was even more beloved by the bumble bees than the neighboring lavender.
I spotted almost perfect circles cut into the leaves of some fireweed – signaling the presence of leaf cutter bees. On one notable morning, I found a darling bee who had gotten trapped under some blueberry netting. After being rescued, this bee wandered up and down my arm with no apparent desire to ever disembark. With no demands on my time, I simply let her. I spent a delightful half an hour observing her habits, and taking long videos, in which I talk to her the entire time.
My interest in backyard bees had begun my first year of gardening, when I went outside to do some hand pollination of my pumpkins. Pumpkins (and zucchini, cucumbers, etc.) all produce male and female flowers. In order for fruit to form, pollen from the male flower needs to make its way over to the female flower. I was late for work and trying to get this task done quickly—but I was thwarted by the presence of several bumble bees in my most promising male flower. I waited, attempting to telegraph my irritation to these insect interlopers, when it dawned on me (with no small amount of shame) that I was the true interloper. And I was totally unnecessary. There was clearly going to be a steep learning curve.
I continued to casually observe bees, but my fascination really solidified when I watched a short documentary called, “My Garden of a Thousand Bees.” The premise is simple: wildlife filmmaker Martin Dohrn is stuck at home during the early days of the pandemic. Predictably, he turns his skill and attention to the wildlife available to him – specifically, the native bees in his backyard. He films these bees with meticulous care, giving them names, and following their brief lifecycles as they play out over a summer in his urban backyard. The 53-minute film is incredible, and it was absolutely spellbinding to me. Not only were the bees themselves fascinating, but the idea that all of this diverse wildlife could be observed without going anywhere was enthralling.
In case the terms “native” or “wild” bee don’t immediately register, let’s step back. When we think of bees, we usually think of honeybees. Honeybees capture most of the bee-related public imagination, but the domesticated Western Honeybee (Apis mellifera) is only one imported (i.e. non-native) species. These bees make honey and wax, and can live in managed hives, making them very useful both for the products they create and for their agricultural services. But honeybees also have limitations, the most obvious being that they are a single species.
By contrast, the US and Canada have over 4,000 species of wild, native bees. Worldwide, there are over 20,000 species. Wild bees are crucial for pollination everywhere, and they are largely what we find in our own backyards. With few exceptions, wild bees are solitary bees. They don’t live in hives, but nest in the ground, or in cavities found in places like dead wood, or brush. Thus, it’s fairly easy to cultivate a habitat for them, usually by simply not cultivating a portion of our yards.
I was extraordinarily lucky to have had a mild case of Covid, and to get to pass that time in the comfort of my home and garden — and with the bees. And while not everyone might share my nerdier tendencies, I would argue that wild bees are worth our attention not only because they are essential, but also because they are incredibly accessible. These bees live all around us, and until I got Covid, I never slowed down enough to really observe them. Forced to stay in one place, I was finally able notice their details, to start differentiating between them, and to appreciate that an entire ecosystem existed in my backyard.
Some of my favorite bee material at the moment:
Documentary: My Garden of a Thousand Bees
Our Native Bees: North America's Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them by Paige Embry
The Bees in Your Backyard by Joseph S Wilson & Olivia Messinger Carril
Also, on the subject of permaculture & making space for wildlife, I’ve found this book particularly helpful: Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway