A Brief Inquiry on Bees
Sometimes big lessons come in small, fuzzy, black-and-yellow packages.
I’m a bee person.
You’ve seen them: big, bustling bumblebees with their fuzzy coats of rusted oranges and golden yellows; sweat bees coated in an iridescent exoskeleton that zip through the air like flying jewels; bees are literally everywhere. My love for these insects grew after spending this past summer studying pollination ecology. Coming immediately from a summer in the field to a semester in the field, it is hard for me not to see how bees can relate to almost everything we do on The Expedition. From how we operate collectively to obtain food and cook meals for each other, to defending one another from unfavorable outsiders who try to infiltrate our community (raccoons, I’m looking at you), down to the ratio of females to males (15:3, sorry Brent, Jeff and Boaz). I see the Expedition as a giant hive, and everyone has to step up to the plate in order for the operation to be successful.
The Expedition’s relationship with bees doesn’t just extend to the logistics of how we operate. Bees are amazing teachers, brimming with lessons about ecosystems, history, climate change, and sustainability; we just have to take the time to learn from them—and what better place to take that time than a semester spent outside.
Let them teach us about the past. There are over 4,000 native bee species in the United States, yet most conversations, community education, and decorative tea towels that you might find in your grandma’s kitchen are dominated by a bee that is not native to the US: the European honeybee Apis mellifera. Brought over by European settlers in the 17th century, the honeybee takes not only the limelight from its indigenous relatives, but floral resources that native bees rely upon to survive. Whether it’s cuckoo bees, carpenter bees, mason bees, sweat bees, or bumble bees, these native pollinators have also evolved to serve specialized roles in the pollination of native plants that honeybees are not built to do.
Let them teach us about landscapes and resilience. As we drive through spaces that have seen so much displacement and annihilation, it’s hard to imagine that such seemingly delicate ecological relationships can thrive there. But then I remember that upon pulling the vans over to a parking lot outside of the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana—the United States’ largest Superfund site—I witnessed a small patch of thistle peeking through the cracks by the sidewalk, humming with life as a cluster of leafcutter bees gathered pollen to pack under their abdomens. I remember that as I hiked through the burnt forest on the outskirts of Holden Village in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, the fields of fireweed bustled with life as bees flew from flower to flower, looking for those who bloomed a little late in the season and could still be good sources of provisions. Being an environmental science student is typically a dismal field of study, but witnessing the way that these organisms have found their own vehicles of persistence through the Anthropocene is something that gives me hope.
Let them teach us what I think is their most important and pressing lesson: that our existing systems create a division between humans and nature, and insects are one of the most accessible bridges across that divide. While I may have seen both wolves and the western bumblebee Bombus occidentalis in Yellowstone National Park, I only saw one of them again in downtown Kalispell. Expanding our definitions of what nature is, and perhaps including developed spaces in our definition, can help us begin to stop othering these systems that have given us so much and whom upon we are directly reliant for survival. When you can spur within someone a prick of passion or respect for a small, squishable organism with a reputation for stinging people, it makes it that much easier to extend compassion to other aspects of the environment. Perhaps passing a pollinator garden in a city center will remind someone that paved sidewalks and traffic-jammed roads still exist within an ecosystem, even if these structures contributed to the destruction of a preexisting one.
On a visit to White Water Ranch, a blueberry farm surrounded by the burn scar of the Holiday Farm Fire, I decided to let the bees teach me.
They taught me about the past. The owner of the farm, Jim Russel, had mason bee nest boxes and honeybee hives throughout the blueberry fields to help aid in the pollination of his plants. University of Oregon professor Peg Boulay explained a student project in development that is working to establish a native plant garden to help attract bumblebees, a species who has evolved to pollinate fruiting plants like blueberries through the extremely effective process of buzz pollination. There are elements of decolonization found in healing landscapes and supporting the survival of non-human native species. When we move away from the settler-colonial honeybee to make space for indigenous bees to thrive, I believe that we are supporting this vision of a decolonized future.
They taught me about landscapes and resilience. Jim told us how his property went from a place bustling with pollinator diversity to a charred, barren space, loud with their absence in the wake of the fire. I then looked around at the remnants of what was a massive fireweed bloom during what would have been the end of July. The land knows who is missing, and it looks like it’s working hard to try and bring them back with tall towers of deep pink flowers, full of pollen and nectar.
They taught me about closing the divide between humans and the environment. The mutualism between our lives and the insects that pollinate our crops is easily forgotten when you aren’t growing food or interacting with the people who do. Hearing Jim speak on wanting to attract native buzz pollinators in order to better his blueberry yield shows that strengthening natural systems not only helps the flora and fauna within that system, but directly strengthens our ability to feed and water ourselves.
When your classroom is the outdoors, you find teachers in unexpected places (and in unexpected things)—you just have to slow down enough to allow them to actually teach. As we continue our expedition, I will keep looking for the big lessons that I can find in these small insects, because like I said: I’m a bee person.
This is great!