Country Mouse Monday: the dearth

Spend enough time watching bees, and I swear, it changes what you see. It changes how you see.

You don’t have to keep bees to do this. All you have to do is stand around, observing the action flower-to-flower in some green place. Where are they landing? What are they gathering?

What I see right now? The dearth is upon us.

Because I’ve had a bit more time this year to keep watch, first I noticed something that I hadn’t before: that there’s a particular timing to it all. So that even though a particular plant may be in bloom, there’s a point of readiness, a time at which the flower is ripe for the bee.

When the first poppies opened this year, they stood  there, lonely it seemed to me, unvisited by bees. But when the day was right, when the pollen was right, then the bees stormed in, two and three to a flower, rolling, gathering so effectively that within hours not a speck remained, the ground littered with discarded petals.

After the boom, the bust.

And now it’s the height of summer. We visit the blackberry bramble on the corner in the evenings while walking the dog, our fingers and mouths stained red with juice, shins bloodied but so worth it, every fat perfect berry the product of some good bee’s work. As we walk the neighborhood, we glean: we eat plums at one neighbor's, a juicy peach at another's, hands sticky.

Back at home, the squashes and peppers and tomatoes are raging, but all that green masks a change. The poppies are long-gone. The long-blooming tansy has waned. As I deadhead the cosmos, suddenly I can see how little is in bloom anymore, how little there is for bees to eat. Bees are all over the creeping thyme, the thyme they’ve ignored for months, and they’re back in their winter food, the borage, hanging on to those bright blue blooms, drinking deep.

The dearth is this precise other end of the spectrum, this mid-summer bust following the boom of the springtime nectar flow, this abrupt scarcity just when the population in the colonies is at its highest, along with the heat. Watch and learn.

Now is a time to let weeds bee.

Now is a time to be careful and thoughtful. To stop and look first, before pulling a weed or a bolted vegetable from the ground. If that flower is feeding somebody, then leave it. I let the cilantro go to seed, not just because I know it'll mean lots of little volunteers next spring but also because those fragrant little white blooms will feed pollinators now. Sure, that weird bolted carrot is in my way every time I walk to the compost, but it's food, so I'm leaving it.

Now is also a time to restock.

I consider the new gaps in the garden boxes and in the bee-food supply, and I head to the nursery, on the hunt. I walk around until I hear the bees, and those are the plants I bring home. Bees are so busy in the dahlias that they remain deep in the flowers as I carry the pots to the register, as I wait my turn, as I carry them to the car, flying off homeward only at the last moment. Ditto for the salvia and lavender.

Home again, I turn compost in to Box 2 and add in the new acquisitions that I think will feed and sustain bees through this hard time. It's a small thing, maybe not enough, but still I do it, in service to these creatures that do so much for us.

It guarantees, too, that I can spend more time rocked back on my heels, the hem of my ever-present pinafore brushing the ground, watching bees and learning, surviving the dearth as well as possible, sailing into fall.

xo