I Was Just So Worried About Bees

The whole bee worry sort of sneaked up on me while I was busy worrying about topsoil erosion, desertification, groundwater contamination, //insert ecological threat//. Some time in 2008 or 2009 I remember hearing that bees weren't coming back to their homes and birds were falling out of the sky, that cell phone signals were to blame, or something. It seemed far away and outrageous, so I didn't dwell on it.

Then in 2013 and 2014, BEES were suddenly the thing - almost the only thing. I think at some point it hit the general would-be-bee-worriers that bees pollinate 70% of our top 100 food crops. I watched some documentary footage from a region of China where rapid industrialization had wiped out the bee population; now migrant workers do the job, dipping paintbrushes in sticky sauce and, one blossom at a time, hand pollinating food crops.

Esther prepares for catastrophe

It's a picture of devastation way more immediate and accessible than "climate change," for example.

Worry, worry, worry, bees, bees, bees.

It turns out there is, by my own uneducated estimation, a fairly healthy bee and wasp population in the Heights. It took a while for them to show up, but they finally found my garden and helped me out. THANKS GUYS!

They loved the catmint and rudbeckia I picked up at the Bee-iesta this spring, and now they are all over our anise hyssop (which, by the way, makes a great cocktail). Thanks to Anna Dains for a generous donation to my native-perennial-bee-corner, which I established in July to make more room for my edibles in the raised beds, and to be awesome. I hope some day it will be awesome - for now it's rather unimpressive.

So here it is:

Viola, a bee garden. Rudbeckia hirta, Orange Coneflower (ratibida), Anise Hyssop, Zig Zag Goldenrod, and one lonely native grass, Indian Something, towards the center. I don't know what else there is; the rest will be a fun surprise next year or the year thereafter. I'm hoping it will all grow up and together into a glorious mass of color and nectar in a few short, short years.

I love the mudpit at the end of the sidewalk, by the way. Hooray, Columbia Heights.