Sunday reflection: Honeybees' eucharistic prayer

This gorgeous Spring Sunday morning, 

as I sit beneath our blooming pear tree,

it hums with the wing-song of thousands of bees.

As they take sweet nectar from the blossoms

I feel their gratitude.

I am experiencing the eucharistic prayer of bees.

It's as though they are saying,
"Lord, it is good to be here.
Thank you!"
And with them, I say a Great "AMEN!"

https://youtu.be/gFSpltd3cfA

And Happy Mother's Day to all Moms...
Especially mine!

Simple Suggestion #122 revisited... Learn to like dandelions

When I first wrote this moodling about dandelions in 2012, I had a much different attitude toward them than I do today. I spent hours and hours with my "weed hound," digging them out of our lawn in the company of my neighbour, Olga, who was doing the same in her yard. We were in solidarity, complaining about how the seeds from the little area park across the street blew into our yards and messed up our turf.

Since then, Olga has moved into senior's housing, we've used lasagna gardening to replace our front lawn with a big perennial bed, and my view of dandelions has changed. I've come to see them as a valuable part of our Edmonton ecosystems, providing the earliest food source for our bee populations.

Bees, both wild and domestic, aren't as plentiful as they used to be, thanks to climate change, pesticides and herbicides. Every year I seem to run across bees that aren't doing well, that seem to be reeling from illness (pesticide use?) or maybe it's just exhaustion because they work so hard. Regardless, the bee deaths I keep witnessing have distressed me to the point that it's a lot harder to pull up all the yellow flowers that so many of us view as the scourge of the green rectangles we cultivate in front of our homes.

So I've come up with something of a compromise. I let the yellow flowers bloom, and when they turn white, I pick and toss them if I have time. White seed heads aren't much use to bees anyway, and using so many hours of my life digging weeds isn't a great way to spend energy when I could be planting more flowers.

I've come to a place where I can live with imperfection in my yard, especially if it means more food for our bumbling friends. So rather than digging up all those dandies, I keep them down to a dull roar by pulling them when I can. Sometimes after a good rain I am lucky and get them out right to the end of their roots, but most times, they have a chance to bloom again later in the season. More bee food.

And it's okay, because perfect green rectangles are highly overrated, and our pollinators can't be! Our planet's food chain would be much more secure if we could garden like God does, playing no favourites -- and just learn to like dandelions, or at least put up with a few here and there!

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Simple Suggestion #252... Take a nature break

When I sit at my computer too long, my eyes don't like it. So I've decided to take more little nature breaks. Here's what I saw during one of my breaks today. Bees amaze me, that they can even fly with those stubby little wings. Just thought I'd share.

Why not take your own nature break today? Go outside, even for just two minutes.

Simple Suggestion #204... Be nice to bees

It's a late spring, and our bees are awake and hungry -- I've seen a few buzzing around my yard looking for sustenance. Fortunately, my first dandelions are blooming, with many more to come because I refuse to use chemicals in my yard, preferring to dig them out. And this year, my concern for my little bumbling buddies is reaching an anxiety level such that I'm not going to dig for a while, though I will pull off the seed heads. Dandelions are an excellent source of food for bees, at least until other things start to bloom.

It's been another hard winter for apiary colonies, and between colony collapse disorder, parasites, and pesticide use, bees could use a break and a little help from us to leave their food sources alone, and to plant more to help them out.

So today's challenge is to think about our little yellow and black pollinators and hold off on our need for a weedless yard, avoiding pesticides at all cost, and even leaving those dandies for a bit... at least until our fruit bearing trees are in bloom -- and other things that can support our bees.

Look at how much they do for us -- and don't forget to thank a honey bee today!

Not sure where this graphic originates, but what would we do without bees??

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The bee's knees

Suzanna has always had a soft spot for injured or unwell animals... or creatures in danger. She's the one who came to me with a mouse held in her garden gloves, before Chloe, the neighbourhood cat, could catch it as it scampered from leaf pile to leaf pile on the road past our house. If a bird hits our window, Suzanna will put it into a little box and sit nearby until it regains its senses and flies away.

So I wasn't surprised when she called me to the back step the other day, and showed me a bee that wasn't moving very much. "How can I help him?" she asked.

I shook my head. I've been finding more dead bees than I like in our yard lately... done in by exhaustion? Pesticides? Colony collapse disorder? Genetically modified plants? Parasites? Our little pollinator friends have so many enemies... humans and our farming/gardening practices being the worst. I'm heartened by the fact that so many people are starting to realize the importance of bees (if you want to see what your produce department would look like without them, click here). The necessity of reducing pesticides and GMOs is becoming more and more obvious to Joe and Jane Public, but I fear that our actions to fix what's broken may not be enough to save our pollinators from extinction. Just yesterday I heard another report about the decimation of bee colonies in Ontario. I haven't the heart to look for Alberta apiary reports because I suspect I already know what my back yard is telling me.

The bee Suzanna showed me seemed to be on his last legs. Actually, he was missing one. I shrugged and said I didn't think there was much she could do, but she wouldn't give up. She went into the house, warmed a bit of honey, and drizzled it on the step beside him. I took a garden fork and gently pushed him to a droplet, and he began to eat, or at least we think that's what he was doing, his little proboscis sucking up the stickiness. I told my girl that though I didn't think it was enough to restore him to health, at least he'd die happy, with a full belly.

Suzanna kept vigil with him for quite some time, before I picked him up with a trowel and carried him to our lupins, where he clung tightly. When I went to check on him later, he was gone, and I couldn't find any fuzzy bee carcasses on the ground...

Though I have my doubts about his survival, I marvel at my girl and her compassion for all God's creatures. For the bees' sake, her sake, and the sake of all our kids, we need to do everything we can to protect our fuzzy little yellow and black friends. So put away your Raid, and get rid of your Black Flag. Our bees and our future generations are counting on us.

I think Suzanna is the bee's knees. As are our bees, our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren...

Beautiful borage

Back when I took my Master Composter/Recycler course in 2007, Ron Berezan, also known as the Urban Farmer, spoke to us about permaculture during one of our classes, and sang the praise of a humble plant known as borage. He told us that it had lovely blue star-shaped flowers with leaves that had a nice cucumber-ish flavour, and that it attracted bees by the droves. He suggested that if you want a bumper crop of cucumbers, it's a must-grow plant.

It took me a while, but I eventually found some borage seed in 2010 and planted it all around my cucumber patch. What I didn't know was that borage is a fairly large plant that likes to spread itself out... so the many seeds I planted meant that the plants also nearly took over my onion and strawberry sections of the garden. I learned that the texture of the fuzzy leaves wasn't my favourite, though they do have a nice flavour, and I haven't tried the flowers, which are also edible, but I can imagine how pretty they would be sugared on a cake.

What I really love is standing near a plant and watching the bees. I think my yard's fly-in bee population has doubled since I've been growing borage, which has reseeded itself every year since. This year I have about eight plants in the back yard, and six out front, and they're a never ending source of bee happiness until frost. Their leaves also make a refreshing tea, which I plan to try this afternoon.

The Urban Farmer knew of that which he spoke. My luck with cucumbers definitely improved once I had these little blue star flowers near the cucumber patch... and you can see what I mean about how they attract the bees! It won't be long til pickle time, thanks to bees and borage.

Simple Suggestion #126... Listen for bees

Bees are among my favourite creatures. It's taken me most of my life to be able to say that, as, when I was young, a small boy at a campground where we were staying somehow got into a hornet's nest or a wild bee colony, and the sound of his screams still echoes in my memory. I was afraid of anything that buzzed for a long time... until I had children of my own and determined that they would not carry their mother's phobias.

So from the time they were little, I taught my girls to watch bees, and listen for them as they visited the poppies in our yard. I often find one daughter or another paying rapt attention to a little fuzzy black and yellow insect as it finds its way in and out of flowers, collecting nectar and sharing pollen around. The girls aren't afraid, but they do respect bees, especially since Julia was stung once. She was perhaps five, and came screaming into the house, showing me where it hurt. Uncertain what to do, I called my mom, who reminded me of an email that had been making the rounds, saying, "Put a copper penny on a bee sting." So I did, and within minutes, the welt was gone and Julia was back to her happy little self. So there's something to file away in your first aid folder!

This month, the David Suzuki Foundation has a 30x30 Challenge campaign on, encouraging people to get out into nature for at least 30 minutes each day in June. Spending time in nature has been proven beneficial to our physical, mental and emotional health... and I think listening for bees fits right in there, too. Bees are quiet and unobtrusive, and nature wouldn't manage nearly so well without them. They carry lessons for us, too. In particular, I'm thinking of the one in Mary Poppins' song Just a Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down:

The honey bees that fetch the nectar from the flowers to the comb
never tire of ever buzzing to and fro,
because they take a little nip from every flower that they sip
and hence, they find their task is not a grind.

So today's suggestion is to find a field of dandelions, or a patch of blooming chives like I did, and sit still and pay attention to the bees as they humbly go about their work. Their short wings and fuzzy back ends make them seem like little bumbling clowns, and their happy hum while I was taking pictures has made a rather grey day into one that seems a little sunnier, somehow. They do so much, and thanklessly, that they deserve a little appreciation... and we all feel better when we take a nature break. Guaranteed!

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