When bees vanish, say goodbye to your fruits and veggies

As I was channel surfing last night waiting for the World Series to begin (yay for the Red Sox!), I came across two separate shows about the mysterious disappearance of honey bees in recent years. Known as Colony Collapse Disorder, the cause of the current situation has the scientists somewhat baffled. From Bloomberg:

Colony Collapse Disorder remains an entomological enigma a year after it was first described by U.S. beekeepers. The syndrome, in which bees abandon their hives and die, has been found in at least 35 states, a Canadian province and parts of Europe, Asia and South America. The collapse hurt a quarter of U.S. beekeepers, wiping out 45 percent of their bees on average.

As a gardener, and someone who in general spends a lot of time outdoors, I feel as though I have a pretty good understanding of appreciation for the intricacies of nature. Yet even I have a hard time grasping the impact that the disappearance of honey bees would have on our food sources. But it's not just about honey. If you take a step back from the produce department of your local grocery store and picture the life of that apple you hold in your hand, you'll see what I mean. Virtually all the fruits and vegetables we eat have flowers that are pollinated by bees. Without the pollination step, the plants won't produce fruit. Instead, the flower will simply dry up and fall off.

In normal circumstances, the bee who found this apple flower would buzz on back to the hive and do a nifty little dance telling the other bees where this great orchard of pollen can be found. For some reason, today the bee who goes out, doesn't come back to the hive. Eventually all the worker bees stop coming back, and the colony at that particular hive is gone.

To quote a beekeeper in the CBS 60 Minutes story, “Most of the people in this country have no idea what it takes to put the food on their table.”

Are we all about to find out? You can learn more at the web page for Nature's program, Silence of the Bees.

Some good news

I do like to give credit when politicians do good things. My Congressman, John Sarbanes, has introduced legislation called the “No Child left Inside” bill which calls for stronger environmental and outdoor education.

Mr. Sarbanes, a father of three, said spending time outside is “absolutely critical” to the intellectual, emotional and physical health of children, as well as their self-esteem and sense of responsibility. “If we get our kids out into nature, it's going to be good for them.”

Read more here.

If you haven't already read the book “Last Child in the Woods,” I heartily recommend it. The author, Richard Louv, coins a term “nature-deficit disorder,” which he goes to great lengths to make clear is not an official diagnosis.

But he does argue that children are shortchanged when they don't have a chance to play outside and discover nature firsthand. Teachers and environmentalists have known this for quite some time.

From one review of the book:

... a 2002 British study reported that eight-year-olds could identify Pokémon characters far more easily than they could name “otter, beetle, and oak tree.”

“I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are,” reports a fourth grader. But it’s not only computers, television, and video games that are keeping kids inside. It’s also their parents’ fears of traffic, strangers, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus; their schools’ emphasis on more and more homework; their structured schedules; and their lack of access to natural areas. Local governments, neighborhood associations, and even organizations devoted to the outdoors are placing legal and regulatory constraints on many wild spaces, sometimes making natural play a crime.

In “Last Child in the Woods,” Louv talks with parents, children, teachers, scientists, religious leaders, child-development researchers, and environmentalists who recognize the threat and offer solutions. Louv shows us an alternative future, one in which parents help their kids experience the natural world more deeply—and find the joy of family connectedness in the process.

Happy Birthday, Thoreau!

Actually, there are a lot of birthdays today, Henry David Thoreau is a personal hero of mine so he gets top billing today.

Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. He's best known as the author of Walden, and the essay "Civil Disobedience." Form Garrison Keiller on the Writer's Almanac:

He became the first member of his family to go to college. He went to Harvard, but didn't much care for the place. He didn't much care for school teaching either. He went to live with Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord and did odd jobs around the house and took care of the children. It was Emerson who encouraged Thoreau to write poetry and suggested that Thoreau keep a journal, both of which Thoreau continued to do for the rest of his life.

He was 27 years old when he built that little cabin on the edge of Walden Pond and moved in, in an attempt, he said, to "Simplify, simplify, simplify ... to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach."

Also with birthday today: George Eastman, Pablo Neruda, and Julius Caesar, to name but a few.