Keeping the Bees - Laurence Packer - Part 3

Keeping the Bees - Laurence Packer

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 64

  March 5, 2017 

Book 18 - Keeping the Bees
by Laurence Packer (2010)
 Part 3 - pages 117-172
Reading Time - 60 minutes

Did you bees have weird sex? Well... not exactly... but they do. The females can lay virgin birth eggs (no males required). Their chromosomes are a bit strange too. The way in which they pass along their genes means that as populations get smaller, the bees are at a much higher risk of extinction. Which means... we may reach a tipping point with bees much more quickly than we realize.

Bees generally like warm and relatively dry habitat. On the other hand, the more diverse the habitat, the greater the bee diversity. So... if you just have a forest and some meadows but then build a few pathways or dig a soil pit... you've upped the habitat diversity and the bees like that. Which is nice... again... when I look in our backyard. It's good to have some bare soil and some moss and long grass and a pile of twigs and yard waste. It's good to have stones and wood. I hope bees look at our yard and think... wow... bonanza!

On the other hand... there are all sorts of bee enemies out there. Beetle larva that hatch rides on the male bees and then, during the bee mating, switch to the females. They end up back at the nest and decimate the baby bee populations. There's also birds, thunderstorms, Mr. Kravitz with his pesticides and weed-killer and moss-killer and fertilizer, cuckoo bees (who lay their eggs in some other bee's hive), spiders (some of them) and wasps. It's a dangerous world out there for our little bee friends. And we make it much more dangerous.