Keeping the Bees - Laurence Packer - Part 4

Keeping the Bees - Laurence Packer

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 65

  March 6, 2017 

Book 18 - Keeping the Bees
by Laurence Packer (2010)
 Part 4 - pages 173-228
Reading Time - 60 minutes

Bees are in trouble. No doubt about it. Through a combination of climate change , invasive species and habitat fragmentation (all our fault) bees are in trouble. There have been 5 mass extinctions in the last 600,000,000 years... and we are on the edge of causing the sixth. No big deal right? The earth recovered the other 5 times, right? Yup... it just took 10-30 million years to recover. We don't have that sort of time.

Sooo... what can we do? Here ya go!

1. Grow Bee Friendly Plants - preferably Native Species
   - horticultural flowers are not bee friendly (think showy blooms like gladioli, delphinium and monkshood, and prize roses)
   - grow open flowers - asters, umbellifers, squash, lupines, sunflowers, goldenrod, bergamot
   - for fruit and veggies - squash, tomatoes, strawberries, fennel, coriander, parsley, beans, peas, raspberries & blackberries
2. Provide Nest Sites
   - leave old raspberries canes standing OR cut them into foot long lengths, bundle them and hang them from tree branches
   - use bamboo canes to stake plants
   - hoe shallow
   - don't mulch
   - no wood chips or pebbles
   - get rid of lawn and turn into bee friendly flower or veggie garden
3. Do not use Pesticides
4. Buy Organic Food
5. Walk on the Grass
   - cause that makes a well-trodden path that then creates bee habitat (funny)
6. Encourage Bee Friendly Practices at different Government Levels

There you go... time will tell if we can turn around the Titanic of ecological disaster that we have created and that is looming ahead. I'm going out to bundle some raspberry canes into bee habitat...