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Old Point Reyes Schoolhouse Homework Report
by Karen Gray
Letter from the Everglades
April, 2007 - I dreamed of honeybees last night. There is a colossal, black, shiny bumblebee here that buzzes around the mangroves. Watching it set me to worrying about our honeybees at home. I was concerned for them after the severe freeze that we had in February, so I wasn’t surprised when I began to hear that there was quite a die-off observed in California. But then the story got more complicated: bees all over the country were just not returning to their hives. One day the beekeeper would check inside the hives and everything looked fine. The next day – no bees. Not dead or dying in the hive. Absent.
Before we left on this trip to the Gulf of Mexico I sat under our blooming apple tree in the garden with my tea and the newspaper on a sunny Sunday. The quiet was eerie. I looked up into the blossoms and saw one honeybee on her rounds. There should have been hundreds setting up a constant hum in the flower canopy as the petals twitched with their activity.
Honeybees are my California, as essential to the nature of the place as the earth and sky. One of my most vivid early memories is of watching and listening as a honeybee worked her way into a silken California poppy, collected the pollen granules, and emerged from her labors heavily dusted in the rich stuff ready for take off to the next blossom .
Bees are melded in my memory with warmth, sunshine, and food. Always with food, because the food in our fields and orchards wouldn’t grow without the bees. I don’t imagine that anyone ever told me that. I just always understood it. We grew alfalfa, almonds, peaches and grapes. The white washed wooden boxes of bees sat stacked crookedly at the ends of the rows every spring, as much a part of the ranch as the workers who pruned and the ditches that delivered the irrigation water. Bees were everywhere: in the fields, in the hot canning shed in summer attracted by the sweet smell of freshly made jam, fighting against the screens inside the house where they were trapped and in need of shooing back outdoors again to do their job, buzzing around our heads in the car looking for the way back out the window as we whizzed along country roads. Through all of my childhood shared with honeybees I was never stung once.
When I was grown and moved to Point Reyes, my husband kept bees on our grassy hill. They were wonderful. He shared the harvesting equipment for the honey with two other local beekeepers. When he failed to put a super on the hive fast enough for the growing colony to expand one season they swarmed into our upstairs bedroom through a crack in the roof. The other beekeepers came over and helped to capture the swarm, taking it to a new hive box to establish a new colony.
It was a sad day when we had to give up the girls. My neighbor was allergic to bee stings and just couldn’t abide them living so close to her. Later, when I saw bees working in my garden I would wonder where their home was, how far they had traveled to work that day. Now, I’ll also be wondering if they will make it back home again, and if the people at work on the mystery of what’s happening to our honeybees have figured it out yet.
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