Today a friend sent me a link to a new documentary Queen of the Sun. I think I will buy it for our county library just so that I can see it sooner than later. It's about what is happening to the bees and ultimately...us.
My interest in natural science began as childhood curiosity about how and why living things work, especially the birds and the bees. Indeed, biology played a major role in the path that my life has taken.
I had planned on a romantic self-indulgent career in marine biology but the instinctive desire to preserve my DNA put that dream on hold. Well, that and how ridiculous I thought I looked strapped into a wet suit.
Most of my middle life was spent on the Great Plains raising cattle and children. This fed my need to know how things grow and kept me busy enough to almost stop wondering. Almost.
Early on I began to question the need for all of the agricultural chemicals and antibiotics we used on our ranch. As it often happens my concerns were dismissed with the addition of “everything we use is safe enough to drink.”
Once when they sprayed “safe enough to drink” I woke to what sounded like soft hail on my tin roof. This turned out to be hundreds of birds. Even the little Rocky Mountain Bluebirds that I love so well were dead all about me. I kept my children inside for a week.
I called the state and forced an investigation, which served only to label me a hippy in my small community. My celebrity caused me to keep a low profile, but I continued to wonder and converted 175 acres to organic hay and lamb production.
Organic farming is wonderfully all consuming and it worked well for a time…until I got the bees. I really loved my bees, as much as I love those tiny Rocky Mountain Bluebirds.
Early January 2006 I checked my hives. All were full of healthy looking, active, winter bees and plenty of honey left them for the winter. When I checked in February the hives were still full of honey, pollen, and brood cells, but empty of bees.
Oh, there were a few deads, maybe a hundred in each hive, but nothing like the 20,000 workers and their queen that should have been there. They weren’t dead they were just…gone. In the frigid desolation of a prairie winter bees do not naturally swarm or even leave the hive very often. I didn’t know it, but I had been devastated by Colony Collapse Disorder.
The birds and the bees caught my interest as a child and they sent me back to school as a woman in an attempt to understand what is happening in our world and how it can possibly be “safe enough to drink.”
I am working on my Masters with a more feasible eye toward soil science and food security instead of marine biology, but frankly I just can’t see myself in a wet suit anymore.
Life isn't fair, but I can be.
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