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Why Leaf Piles Make Me Sad

 

Leaf pile

I’m keeping my leaves!

Morning light slants, setting heaps of golden leaves afire. It’s so lovely.

As I bike by, families are outside raking, making great piles for small offspring to leap into. There are peals of laughter amidst flying leaves. American Beauty portraits are taken of toddlers. Minnesota is celebrating her seasons .

Why am I sad?

It’s not existential angst, in spite of the fleeting nature of this glorious moment. It’s not that winter is coming, although that is sobering enough .

It’s that all those piles are going into bags. Lined up on front lawns, standing in phalanxes at the end of every drive, all of them are headed for the cities’ compost sites. That’s what is making me so sad.

Those bags are a symptom of our disconnect from natural cycles. Trees grow leaves; habitat and food for myriad life forms. Those leaves are supposed to fall and their nutrients return to the earth below that tree. The inhabitants of that leafy canopy actually need to stay near to their shelter and food source for survival.

Nature takes care of itself best when it has a rich interconnected web of life cycles. Called plant guilds in permaculture terms, each supports the other with habitat, forage, pollination, pest predation, nutrients and moisture retention .

Swept clean of all diversity, lawns do none of these things. They are monocultures. They break the cycle of nutrients. Lawns leave our trees bereft of their companion plants and beneficial insects. The trees suffer. Pollinators starve. Our entire ecosystem is impoverished for the sake of nothing but grass, a suburban icon of emptiness.

Is it any wonder we’ve lost 50% of our wildlife worldwide in the last forty years ?

This female polyphemus moth, newly emerged from the leaf litter near our woodpile, is displaying her blue"eyes".

This female polyphemus moth, newly emerged from the leaf litter near our woodpile, is defensively displaying her blue “eyes”.

Many of you don’t know that I came to pollinator activism through raising butterflies and moths. Some of Minnesota’s most beautiful creatures spend the first half of their lives in our trees’ canopies. At summer’s end they wrap themselves in a silken blanket, curled and camouflaged in a leaf. Then they fall to the ground along with all those other leaves, hidden, to sleep the winter and emerge in the early summer to begin their cycle anew.

That is, if they’re not mulched and sent to the compost site first.

Luna moths, those fairy emissaries of the night with their pale green glowing wings, are one beautiful species that overwinters in the leaf litter below their food source, the birch or black walnut.

Another is the polyphemus, also of the grand silkworm family. Feeding on maple and red oak, they used to be common. With gorgeous tawny gold wings four and half inches across, they are only a little smaller than their cousins, the giant Cecropias.

Polyphemus are impossibly cute with great feathery antennae and furry faces. This last phase of their life is solely for reproduction. They have no mouth parts, subsisting instead on the energy stored in their plump furry bodies from that previous year’s summer spent quietly munching as caterpillars high in the tree canopy. The great blue eyes on their wings are intended to frighten predators, and are their only defense.

Males have magnificent feathery antennae,.just look at that face!

Just look at that face! Males have magnificent feathery antennae used to scent the females’ pheromones.

Unfortunately, big blue eyes are no defense against mulching.

Rake or blow, but please,  leave those leaves in your yard. The less grass the better! Create ever expanding islands of mixed shrubs, plants, and ground covers around your trees and perimeters. Mimic the layers of a forest or meadow in form and function. Shrink the grass. Grow your plant guilds. There are so many living reasons to do so.

If I hadn’t stopped bagging my leaves I would never have witnessed wild Polyphemus emerging in my own yard .

You may have seen me last weekend with a borrowed louder-than-bombs fume spewing leaf blower, heaping leaves onto the garden beds and the shrubby perimeters. I’d rather rake than blow, but the quart of fuel it burns is less than I’d use for repeated trips to physical therapy for a bad rotator cuff.  Next year, I’m going to have even less grass, and more cycles of life will be connected vertically, from treetop to soil. I may never have to borrow that louder-than-bombs-blower again.

Night of The Polyphemus! Saturnid moths, including Polyphemus, Cecropias, and Lunas, fly at dusk . Our guests call it a Butterfly Release Party, which is not entirely accurate, but the magic is there!

Night of The Polyphemus! Saturnid moths including lunas, polyphemus , and cecropias, make their first flight after dusk. Our guests call it a Butterfly Release Party, not entirely accurate, but the magic is there!

It’s because I’m keeping my leaves that right around Midsummer’s Eve, we get to host our own yearly Night of the Polyphemus Butterfly Release Party. Some of the guests are likely to be wild. You’re invited, too. It’ll be magical.

Bee Swell!

Nora

 

oDesigning Plant guilds including oak, ash, walnut and fruit, bee guilds for Midwest permaculture.

Half of global wildlife lost, says new WWF report

Seeds Of Inspiration

Brown Belted Bumblebee, Bombus griseocollis. "Seed", by Deb Grossfield

Brown Belted Bumblebee, Bombus griseocollis. “Seed”, by Deb Grossfield

Seeds are wondrous things.  As metaphors they sprout hope in our hearts. They blossom as awareness in our consciousness. In the physical world they are miraculously engineered packages of DNA. They survive fire, drought, and floods. They float. They fly. They transport life’s diversity through time and space.

The seed of a date palm more than two thousand years old was dug  from King Herod’s palace and planted. It grew. They named it Methuselah.

Seeds are the love-child of pollinators and flowering plants. Entomophily; pollination by insects. Entomo; insect. Phile; love.

Picture the orchid; it’s beautiful intricacies co-evolved with pollinators, matching form and function in a reproductive cross-species tango. A rapture of perfume and pollen, a petal stroked, nectar stoked love-fest that produces fruit and seed, butterflies and bees.

My mother in-law is on her way over with seeds for me. She is bringing cup plant and partridge pea seeds. Cup plants are stately North American perennials with a gleeful profusion of sunflower-like blooms adored by bees and butterflies. Their clasped leaves hold rainfall, hence their name. The great stalks are home to native bees, their seeds are feasted upon by finches. The partridge pea is a nectar rich native annual with bright yellow pea-like flowers, and feathery foliage.

In exchange, I have wild indigo seeds for her. These large pods rattle enticingly, and are often used in dried arrangements. Bumblebees find indigo irresistible. On one bumblebee survey I found bumbles of three different species, all deep in joyous oblivion inside indigo blossoms, ignoring every other flowering plant in the meadow.

Seed exchanges like this have gone on for as long as humanity has cultured plants. Saving seeds, or seed banking, is the practice of storing seeds, roots and tubers from year to year. For millennia, seed banking  has been the traditional way of maintaining our farms and gardens.

That’s the fun part of seeds. In the past five decades we have shifted from seed banking to seed buying. Here comes the frightening part; most people don’t know that the majority of the plants and seeds they buy are now treated with pesticides;  invisible,  unlabeled, and toxic to our pollinators.

Meet the scary family of systemic pesticides called Neonicotinoids.

Neonicotinoids,  or neonics, are a class of neural toxins based on nicotine. Their names float through my mind late at night, like a poison mantra. They are Acetamidprid, Clothianiadin, Dinotefuran, Imidacloprid, Thiamethoxam…Fipronil.

  • Neonics are systemic. A treated seed or plant expresses the toxin in its roots, stem , leaves, flowers, nectar , pollen, seed, and fruit. It becomes a poison factory.
  • Neonics are nerve toxins. In low doses they impair bees’ reproduction, immune systems,  ability to forage, and return to the hive. Lost Bees are soon dead bees.
  • In higher doses they are simply lethal.
  • They are persistent. They stay in plants tissues for multiple seasons. They persist in soil, some for as much as 19 years, and possibly longer.
  • Most plants and seeds sold today are treated with neonicitinoids; it is the agricultural and nursery standard.
  • 94% of our corn crop in 2012 was pre treated with neonicotinoids .
  • 51% of plants sampled last summer from Lowes and Home Depot were contaminated with neonics . Many were toxic enough to kill a bee in one visit… And they were labeled “Bee Friendly”.
  • It’s not just the bees; neonics affect soil and aquatic animals, small mammals, and birds. A single kernel of treated corn is enough to kill a songbird.

Neonicotinoids are now the world’s most widely used pesticide. A recent meta analysis of over 800 scientific studies shows neonicotinoid pesticides to be 5000 to 10,000 times more toxic than DDT. Between 75 and 95% of the worlds flowering plants need pollinators to produce seed or fruit. It’s not just one third of our food, this critical situation affects virtually everything alive, the seeds of life.

 

“Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution.”

Norman Vincent Peale

What to do? Here are easy steps you can take to make a pollinator friendly environment in your own backyard, city, state, and beyond:

Flowers!

  • Go wild, gather seeds from fields and meadows! Get neighborly, host seed swaps, share perennials!
  • Scatter seed bombs, it’s an easy way to plant with minimal soil preparation. Balls of clay, compost, and wildflower seeds, they are available through growtherainbow.com, which also has DIY instructions. Use organic or neonic free seeds, of course.
  • Plant lots of neonic free flowers and native plants.
  • Ask before you buy; are they neonic free? If they don’t know, don’t buy! Your choices put pressure on nurseries to change their buying practices.
  • Welcome diversity in your lawn; clover, dandelions, violets, and creeping charlie are bees’ food.
  • Don’t forget our monarchs! Keep a stand of milkweed just for these threatened and iconic pollinators.
  • Use nontoxic alternatives to pesticides and fungicides.

Habitat!

  • Leave areas in your yard wild and untilled as nesting space for wild bees.
  • Keep piles of undisturbed wood sticks and plant stalks in an out of the way corner; solitary bees use these to nest too.
  • Add stones to a birdbath to save thirsty bees from drowning.
  • Wild bee houses are fun projects for the whole family.

Educate!

  • Continue to educate yourself about our pollinators and the issues affecting them.
  • Share your knowledge with friends, family, neighbors , and coworkers

Advocate!

  • Go to city hall, write your council people, and legislators.
  • Tell them you want a bee safe city, and a bee safe state, with lots of pollinator safe forage and protection from pesticides. Eugene OR, Spokane WA, Shorewood MN, and Seattle WA did it. We can too!

Vote!

  • Ask your candidate to support H.R 2692, the Saving America’s Pollinator act!
  • Call toll free 1-855-686-6927 and ask for your representative. This bill would protect bees by requiring the EPA to suspend four of the pesticides belonging to the class of neonicotinoids until their safety can be determined.

Buy Organic!    

  • Organic practices support our pollinators year round. Organic apples are more expensive than conventional ones are now, but they’re a whole lot cheaper than hand pollinated fruit will be in the future.

Be brave! It’s urgent. It’s late. But it’s not too late. Plant hope. Grow the Rainbow!

Bee Swell!
Nora

World wide integrated Assessment of Neonicotinoid Pesticides meta analysis of over 800 scientific studies

Pesticides linked to mass bee deaths also affect other friendly organisms including birds and fish

Bee toxic pesticides found in garden center plants labeled bee friendly

You need pollinators, pollinators need you

 

This Is Honey Joe

imageI’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine.

This is Honey Joe, my cultural gem of a neighbor. He’s a nimble 93, and has been a beekeeper for 69 years. He’s had hives all over the metropolitan area, including the nature centers, but now he concentrates on those in his backyard, next to the golf course. He works with his bees without a suit. Or a veil. And no gloves.

He doesn’t use a smoker other than the burnished pipe in his surprisingly young, if tremulous hands. Before Joe lifts the cover off a hive he leans over, talking softly to himself and his bees, and blows three puffs of fragrant tobacco smoke across the opening. Calms them, he says. Quit the pipe once but smokers are too hard to keep lit. Gloves get in his way.

Just move slow, he says, stay behind the hive, the bees won’t be worried by you. So I go without gear too, and it feels less hindered, more natural, and safer, even.

His khaki pants are so imbued with the sweet scent of beeswax that the bees cling to his legs as if they were home. The insects stroll on his hands, his pipe, his hat, his nose. They don’t bother with me. Occasionally a bee does crawl up inside his pants leg, as it did this day. He sucks in his lean midsection, tugs on his belt, and calmly lets her out.

Today he tells me stories of pole vaulting the canals in the Netherlands as a boy searching for plover eggs in spring. It was an annual competition to find the very first egg, considered a culinary treasure, for a prize of gold guilders from the queen. He tells of doing his father’s milk deliveries by skow and gathering blue-green duck eggs along the way. A skow is a flat bottomed boat with a blunt bow used for ferrying cargo, the  etymology of which is from the old Dutch word schouwe.

He’ll tell you he doesn’t hear so good yet his eyes are still blue and bright with no glasses. It’s said bee stings ward off arthritis: I wonder if this is true. It seems so for Joe. He crouches and stands up from the floor-level honey spigot in one smooth movement. My own knees are noisier.

Every chance I get I’ve always asked him; How are the bees, Joe? Some years; good, but hungry. Some years; not so good. Then there was the spring of 2013. No bees showed up to visit our apple trees’ blossoms. None. Not one. It brought home to me for the first time just how dire the situation is  that our bees are in.

It was Joe’s hives that we rescued from the rising flood waters of Minnehaha Creek this last spring. He’d already had a rough winter, losing ten out of twelve hives.The latest Harvard research shows that neonic pesticide exposure combined with a hard winter can be catastrophic for bees. Indeed, it was.

Joe called me one night in June . Water’s getting a little high around the hives, could use some help, he says. Should I come now? I ask. No, I’m not up to it. Tomorrow’s fine, he says.

It rained all night. By morning his ten hives were in three feet of swirling creek water, some halfway up the first level of brood supers, in spite of being raised up on blocks. A super is one of the wooden drawer-like boxes which are stacked to house the colony as it grows. I had helped install his new queens in April and now their new brood was literally drowning.

My phone died in the torrential rain after a couple of panicked calls for help. Joe and I donned black garbage bags as rain suits and knee high boots, but the water was higher. Three stalwart friends appeared, one with her thirteen year old son, and for three hours we hauled hives and concrete blocks up the muddy hill to higher ground. The local news crew came, on their way to film neighborhood sandbagging, their cameras also under black garbage bags.

Super by super, we carefully reassembled the hives in order facing south on leveled concrete blocks in the vegetable garden. To mix the hives up would be deadly to their occupants. The bees were confused to have moved house so suddenly. Some buzzed  for a week or longer at their old address looking for home, but the queens and workers survived.

imageHe lost only one hive, one who’s queen was already weak. It’s orphaned workers he combined with a healthy hive by stacking their supers one atop the other with newspaper between. Over a period of days the two unrelated colonies became familiar with each other’s scent as they chewed through the paper, and acclimated to each other. Humans should be so civilized.

Joe had a successful honey harvest this fall. He gifted each of his volunteers with a big jar of golden honey as a thank you from himself and his bees.

Much of this harvest was clover honey. The clover was from neighborhood lawns, which the bees subsisted on during our long wet summer while their usual wildflower fields were underwater. The adjacent boulevard had became a river, the golf course and Joe’s backyard was a lake dotted by white egrets.

The golf course and wildflowers have not yet recovered, but Joe’s bees have. At least for now. Winter is coming, and they have a good store of honey. But then, they did last year, too.

It’s hard to be a bee these days, you know.

You can say hi personally to Joe and his bees if you walk or golf on the city course. Ask him how his bees are.

Bee Swell!

nora

Ps. How are your bees? Any clover in your lawn for them? Or for Joe’s ?

 

Spring! Glorious Spring!

It’s been so long awaited this year, the year that winter would never end, but now at last, it’s time to plant! Here are two upcoming events not to be missed with a focus on our pollinators’ favorite forage; native plants. Natives; rich with with pollen, brimming with nectar, and with a wild beauty that’s as hardy as we are! Your bees, butterflies and bumbles will thank you.
See you there!
Bee Swell,
Nora

Saturday May 31, 2014

Native Plants for Pollinators Sale
Natural Shore Technologies
5300 Highway 12, Maple Plain, MN
Book Signing 10 am – 3 pm
Book signing by Heather Holm, author of Pollinators of Native Plants, a beautiful and comprehensive guide to the plant communities which support our native pollinators, with over 1600 photos and illustrations.

June 7, 2014 · 9am-3pm

Landscape Revival: Native Plant Expo and Market
Community Pavilion at the Roseville Rainbow Foods
1201 Larpenteur Ave W (NE corner of Larpenteur & Fernwood, just west of Lexington)
Roseville, MN 55113
The Landscape Revival – Native Plant Expo and Market offers gardeners one convenient location to shop for Minnesota native plants from 12 local native growers and learn how to use the plants from eight conservation organizations. Accessory products such as organic compost, rain barrels and native plant seed will also be for sale. The goal of Landscape Revival is to promote the use of native plants by educating about their benefits for wildlife habitat, pollinators and water quality. The event is sponsored by Saint Paul Audubon Society, Wild Ones and Blue Thumb.

BeeSwell

Posts

  • Why Leaf Piles Make Me Sad
  • Seeds Of Inspiration
  • This Is Honey Joe
  • Spring! Glorious Spring!

NOTE: While care has been taken to ensure that the information in BeeSwell is as accurate as possible at the time of preparation, BeeSwell takes no responsibility for any errors or omissions in the original data source. Due to limited resources, data sources often have changed since they were last incorporated into the database, and may need updating. The information in this database does not in any way replace or supersede the information on the pesticide product labeling or other legal requirements. Please refer to the pesticide product labeling. Copyright © 2018 Nora Wildgen, Illustrator · Graphic Design by Acorn Design Group · Log in