Of all the ills afflicting bees,giants of a sort may not be among them, but mites may be implicated in their decline. If you believe the sort of giants that may be afflicting the bees worst of all, which is to say pesticide manufacturing giants such as Bayer and Syngenta, the primary culprits to blame for bee colony declines are not their neonicotinoid pesticides, but rather Varroa mites. The mites afflict honey bees, weakening them as they feed on the bees’ fat reserves and injecting viruses into the bees through their sucking mouth parts.
But all manner of bees and other pollinating insects are declining around the world, not just the honey bees that are afflicted with Varroa mites. Neonicotinoid pesticides work systemically by being absorbed into every part of a plant, including the flowers, attacking the nervous system of whatever invertebrate feeds on the plant, including the flowers. As the name suggests, neonicotinoids are derived from nicotine, a poison found in tobacco and other plants in the nightshade family.
Nicotine has long been applied topically to plants and insects as a pesticide. Japanese chemists synthesized Imidacloprid, the first neonicotinoid, in the 1980s. In the 1990s, Bayer began large scale manufacturing and distribution of the pesticide, which was an advance over plain nicotine on account of its solubility in water and consequent ability to disseminate systemically throughout a plant for long-term protection from insect feeding, rather than being restricted to the temporary effects of topical application.
A red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius) queen feeds on the flower of a blueweed (Echium vulgare) in Keila, northwestern Estonia. Photo by Ivar Leidus.
It’s interesting then that the pesticide manufacturing giants have followed the lead of Big Tobacco in muddying the research waters regarding their products. In the previous century, the tobacco industry fought efforts by researchers and regulators to fully inform the public of the dangers of tobacco use, generally by spreading the spurious claim that there was more doubt about the issue than there really was, and by persuading a vocal minority of clinicians and media flacks to side with them. This model has since been followed by the fossil fuel industry in denying the human causes of climate change.
A 2013 cover by Circe Link and Christian Nesmith of “Your Move” by Yes. One could choose to hear the lyrics in the background chorus as “Give bees a chance” instead of “Give peace a chance”.
Now, after scientists and environmentalists sounded the alarm about neonicotinoids in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the pesticide giants have adopted the same methods, and their fall guy, as it were, is the lowly Varroa mite, a creature difficult to like in any scenario. Bayer and Syngenta and the rest have been aided and abetted in their disinformation campaign by the current presidential administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, an agency rendered ineffectual in protecting the environment by the hiring of right wing ideologues who are all too eager to sow goodwill among multinational corporations by not allowing the collapse of bee populations to get in the way of reaping enormous sums of money. After all, what are friends for?
— Izzy
“Oats. n.s. [aten, Saxon.] A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”
— from A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson.
The detrimental effect on the dairy industry of lockdowns state governments have instituted in reaction to the coronavirus could have long term consequences, tipping the balance abruptly toward greater production of plant derived milks, butters, and cheeses. Traditional dairy has been losing market share to plant derived dairy for decades, with losses getting larger especially in the past decade. Now loss of revenue due to coronavirus lockdowns of schools and restaurants could mean bankruptcy for many dairy farms and a long term shift toward lower production as traditional dairy transforms into a lesser role.
There will no doubt always be demand for traditional dairy products, but if supermarket shelf space is an indicator of what consumers want, then plant derived milks have taken the largest chunk of shelf space away from traditional dairy, while butters, and particularly cheeses have been less competitive. The consumption of animal milk products has always been a peculiarly human practice. The desire for milk and associated products is so great that people will go to great lengths to produce and consume ersatz milk derived from nuts and grains. It is beyond the scope of this article to investigate why that is; it is enough merely to point out that consumption of milk fulfills for many people a deep-seated need, a need met for all other mammals in infancy, and then forgotten.
Different brands of oat milk available in a German organic supermarket in September 2015. Photo by Fretdf.
“Milk. n.s. [meelc, Saxon; melck, Dutch.] 1. The liquor with which animals feed their young from the breast. 2. Emulsion made by contusion of seeds.”
— from A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson.
It follows then that animal milk production for human consumption is an artificial activity, consequently involving some pain and suffering by the animals, both mothers and their artificially weaned young. We have done these things for so long, for centuries going back ten thousand years or more to the beginning of agriculture, that we think the activities are natural. They are not. The closest parallel in the rest of the animal kingdom can be seen with how ants tend to aphids in order to secure for themselves the aphids’ honeydew secretions. Those secretions are not intended for consumption by the aphids’ young, however, but are merely a byproduct of their ingestion of plant juices. The relationship is closer – but not entirely the same – as our relationship to honey bees than it is to our relationship with dairy animals. The relationship we have with dairy animals is mere exploitation, closer to that of vampire bats with their prey, or to bloodsucking insects with their victims, or even to a virus with its host.
— Izzy
How hardy are the chrysanthemums sold at nurseries, garden centers, and grocery stores in the fall? What is a Dendranthema mum? Are any of the mums used for a fall display going to survive if planted in the ground afterward? The answers are “somewhat”, “no one really knows”, and “maybe”. Welcome to the wonderful world of chrysanthemums, a flowering plant second in popularity only to the rose, and just as susceptible to hybridization and the fickleness that is often a byproduct of botanical experimentation.
If a gardener is concerned at all about procuring a truly hardy, perennial mum when out shopping, he or she might be better off disregarding most of the confusing nomenclature and instead following the rough rule of thumb that the more daisy-like the chrysanthemum flower, the hardier the plant. All those pom-pom and button flowered cultivars have been created by plant hybridizers who were motivated by producing what they presumed to be the showiest flowers, in profusion and in a wide range of colors. As in anything else in life, there are trade-offs, and in the case of hybridized chrysanthemums, generally known as florists’ mums, the trade-off for an abundance of puffed up flowers in nearly every color was a weakened plant that many buyers treat as a tender annual.
A mass of Korean chrysanthemums in bloom in October 2014 at the Conservatory Garden of New York City’s Central Park. Photo by Flickr user David McSpadden.
Here is a plant that has a short season of bloom, typically lasting only a month, which is not bad for a perennial, but is terrible for an annual. What makes most annuals a good value for gardeners is their tendency to bloom continuously for three or more months. Plant them in a particular spot in the garden and they will fill it with color for a season. Some annuals reseed themselves, making them yet a better value. Perennials typically flower a month or two in the year, but since gardeners don’t have to buy new ones each year, they are a good long term value. Many perennials also increase themselves by various means, such as underground runners in the case of truly hardy chrysanthemums.
The florists’ mums that take over stores in the fall are a marketer’s dream plant. Firstly, they demonstrate very well the axiom that “the flower sells the plant” because they have flowers to spare when the plants are at their relatively brief peak period of bloom. Secondly, their fickle requirements for success when planted out among the other perennials in a garden ensures they are only nominally perennials and are in practice annuals, and that translates to turnover for sellers, a yearly marketing bonanza as buyers get new plants each year. Lastly, the genetic pliability of chrysanthemums rewards the efforts of plant hybridizers to produce new and unusual cultivars year after year, driving novelty in the market and the higher profits accruing to patented plants. Chrysanthemum zawadskii in Osaka, Japan. Photo by KENPEI. These are also known as Korean chrysanthemums. The confusion of names makes plant selection difficult for people, but honey bees have no difficulty choosing to visit the flat, open flowers of these truly perennial chrysanthemums, which they prefer over the often tight quarters of the flowers on florists’ mums.
For gardeners who can’t resist picking up a few florists’ mums in the fall, the good news is that they can plant them out and get more than one brief season of bloom from them if they educate themselves about the plant’s requirements and take great care with them the first winter at least. Many gardeners may decide coddling florists’ mums is not worth the trouble, and for them the most pleasing mum in their gardens will be the truly perennial chrysanthemum, and it goes by many names, most often Dendranthema. There is a confusing history to that genus name, a name which for much of the late twentieth century actually applied to all chrysanthemums. Or most of them. It’s hard to tell. Probably it’s best not to bother about it too much. The truly perennial mums can be hard to find in plant nurseries and shops, and much easier to find in old cottage gardens. They’re the waist high mounds of plants covered in masses of daisy-like flowers that honey bees love visiting. — Izzy
The word “natural” on packaged foods does not mean much anymore since there are no standards to uphold it, unlike the case with “organic” on a label, but one area where consumers have been paying attention and making their preference known over the past 20 years is in the labeling of vanilla extract. A significant enough number of consumers have come to prefer vanilla extracted from real, natural vanilla pods that agribusinesses like Nestlé have switched from synthetic to natural vanilla. Synthetic vanilla is a chemistry laboratory product isolated from compounds in wood pulp or petroleum, and for decades in the latter half of the twentieth century it was the preferred choice of most consumers because it was cheap relative to natural vanilla extract, it’s flavor was at least acceptable, and for the most part consumers were not paying attention and didn’t make a distinction between the synthetically derived product and the natural one.
Food ingredient and nutrition labels provide more information to the consumer now, and more people are becoming label readers. Not all of them may know the provenance of synthetic vanilla extract, but a large segment decided they would prefer the natural stuff, and they voted with their dollars. The result was an increase in demand, something growers, the majority of them in Madagascar, were not prepared for since demand for their product had steadily dwindled for decades and they had cut back production or gotten out of the business altogether. Natural vanilla had always been an expensive spice, typically second only to saffron in price on the world market. Competition from synthetic vanilla producers had depressed prices, however, and combined with the drop in demand many farmers saw little profit in the lean decades.
Vanilla planifolia flowers. Photo by Michael Doss.
Vanilla planifolia vine growing up a tree on a plantation on the island of Réunion,which is east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, and is a major producer of natural vanilla. Photo by David Monniaux.
The rather sudden spike in demand for natural vanilla in the past 20 years caused a scramble to reinvest in production, a process which lagged behind demand by as much as five years because of the the time and labor involved in growing and processing marketable vanilla pods. The type of vanilla most popular around the world is Vanilla planifolia, a climbing vine orchid native to Mexico and Central America. Oddly, even though the plant is native to Mexico, and Mexico continues as a big producer of natural vanilla, the place that grows the vanilla most people prefer is Madagascar, an island off the southeast coast of Africa. Soil and other environmental factors must play a role in the end result, because while the type of vanilla orchid is the same in both parts of the world, consumers express a definite preference based on variations they can detect in taste. At any rate, Madagascar currently produces up to 80% of the world’s natural vanilla.
Vanilla planifolia needs to growthree or more years before it will flower, and then each flower remains open for only one day, at which time in Madagascar it must be hand pollinated because of the lack of resident animal or insect pollinators. In Mexico, there is a species of bee that tends to the vanilla flowers. After pollination, nearly a year passes before the pods containing the seeds develop, and after that there is washing, sun curing, sorting, and other handling that goes into producing the dried black pods which have the tiny, flavorful seeds that are the ultimate object of all this careful tending. The labor intensiveness of producing natural vanilla, added to the time involved, drives its price up. It would be a mistake, though, to think individual laborers are well-paid for their work on such an expensive agricultural product; as always, it is typically the people in the middle, the traders, who reap the greatest rewards.
Dried, cured vanilla pods in a basket on the island of Réunion. Photo by tirados joselito.
A year ago in March,a cyclone made landfall on Madagascar with the force of a category four hurricane. Dozens of people were killed, and it was feared damage to the vanilla crop would worsen the worldwide shortage which had driven prices up to a record $600 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) in 2017. The most recent low point in the price was 2002, when dried vanilla pods sold for $20 per kilogram. That’s the price for the agricultural product, of course, not the price after it has been further processed into the vanilla extract available to consumers at supermarkets. It turned out damage to the vanilla crop in Madagascar was not as bad as commodity brokers originally expected.
The opening of the 1984 David Lynch film Dune, with Virginia Madsen as Princess Irulan.
Still, for individual consumers living in cool climates outside the natural growing range of Vanilla planifolia, hedging against a volatile, expensive world market for natural vanilla, with too many of its bets placed on the crop in one place, Madagascar, hedging against all that by growing this orchid in a pot by a windowsill may be a bit of a stretch, considering the advice of some growers who say the plant needs to grow more than ten feet before it will produce flowers, and even then there’s no guarantee of getting pods that will yield recognizably tasty vanilla seeds. It might be a better bet to buy a lot when the market is low, or in other words, hoard it. Vanilla extract always contains a hefty percentage of alcohol, after all, as people who are apt to sneak a drink now and then have always known, and the alcohol is an excellent, natural preservative.
— Izzy
Few fruits or vegetables have as much lore associated with them as the pumpkin. To begin with, is it a fruit or a vegetable? Botanically it is a fruit, because the part we use and eat develops from a flower and contains seeds. Vegetables come from the leaves, stems, buds, and roots of plants. For cooks and the eaters who enjoy the fruits of their labors, however, a pumpkin is to all practical purposes a vegetable.
The nursery rhyme “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,” like many nursery rhymes seems nonsensical at first, and perhaps to young ears and minds it is best left that way because upon delving into its meaning there is darkness at the core, which may or may not yield life lessons, depending on individual interpretation. Charles Schulz’s It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, is more enjoyable for young and old alike, with more accessible life lessons. The 1966 TV special is, at 50, still a favorite for holiday viewing and is a masterwork of the animator Bill Melendez.
Pumpkin flower with bees. Photo by H. Zell.
Ripe pumpkin on the vine. Photo by H. Zell.
Jack O’Lanterns started in Ireland with the carving of turnips, potatoes, and beets long before people there were aware of pumpkins. Pumpkins are native to the Western Hemisphere, as are potatoes, but the introduction of potatoes to Ireland made a much bigger impression because of their culinary usefulness and ease of growth and storage. The subsequent ubiquity of the potato in Irish fields would have devastating consequences when a blight affected the crop for several years in the mid-nineteenth century, giving rise to the Potato Famine. Using pumpkins for Jack O’Lanterns did not catch on until the wave of Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine came to the United States and found the pumpkin most suitable to the purpose.
A display of pumpkins for sale at Halloween.
The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, a painting by John Quidor.
The variety of pumpkin most often grown for decorative carving is the ‘Howden’, developed by Massachusetts farmer John Howden in the 1960s. The pumpkin filling sold in cans for making pumpkin pie is often made from squash varieties which, while belonging to the same genus as pumpkin, Cucurbita, are not from the species we recognize as pumpkin.
One more bit of lore has given us this common image of the pumpkin, and especially its association with spooky autumn nights, and it comes from Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The original story is a bit unclear on whether the Headless Horseman carries around his own head or a pumpkin as a sort of substitute head, but at any rate the version most people are familiar with today and are probably most comfortable with comes from the 1949 Walt Disney short film. As with the Walt Disney version of Cinderella (where a pumpkin also makes an appearance, as Cinderella’s stagecoach), which was taken from a rather dark fairy tale by The Brothers Grimm, story events become more pleasant and less threatening than in the original. Put another way, the treats are nicer and the tricks less scary, or scarry, if you will.
– Izzy
Imagine going to the grocery store as usual and discovering after ingesting some of the food you brought home that it made you ill, weakened the immune system of some of your family, and killed others. You had no way of knowing what was about to happen, and if you want to eat you have no choice but to return to the same grocery store next week, taking your chances. There is no alternative. This is the situation for bees and other pollinators, whose grocery store consists of the flowers they have visited for thousands or millions of years. Massive die-offs of bees and butterflies have been in the news for many years now, and recently the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed the yellow-faced bees of Hawaii on the Endangered Species List, the first bees to be included.
Sand bumblebee on red clover. Photo by Ivar Leidus.
Pollination of dandelion by a bee. Photo by Guérin Nicolas.
Use of broad spectrum pesticides in agriculture is partly responsible for the decline in bee populations, but an often overlooked contributing factor is the part homeowners play when they distribute similar pesticides on their lawns and gardens. Unlike the use of pesticides in agriculture which is done in the name of food production, homeowner use of pesticides is solely in the interest of aesthetics. Individuals can change this behavior more readily than they can the practices of large agricultural concerns.
Change starts in our own yards, and it starts with a change in perspective about what is acceptable and beautiful. Instead of insisting on a monoculture of grass in the lawn, change the definition of the lawn to include some flowering plants. Look on dandelions and clover as beneficial for the bees, rather than as weedy pests to be exterminated at whatever cost in time, money, energy, and collateral damage. An important aspect of Integrated Pest Management is tolerance of a certain amount of pest damage, however “pest” is defined, and the realization that perfection is neither attainable nor even desirable. Nature is messy. The bees prefer it that way, and will thank you for your part in letting it be. The hard part will be in convincing your neighbors of it while fluff from your dandelions drifts into their yards.
