Bees, Eyes, and Horses

Typical construction of mason bee house

   Much has happened in the past few days, much of it the usual transitioning of spring to summer, the mowing of lawns and dealing with sprinklers (changing out solenoids and diaphrams), scheduling overdue appointments and discovering that Costco is already starting to close out some of its summer items as it prepares for the coming fall (what??...we just started June).  So one of the items already out online but with a few left in the warehouses were Swiss bee houses, not for Swiss bees but rather made in Switzerland.  Filled with little tubes, this sort of "home" is meant to house wild mason bees...and then came the article in Scientific American.  Said the piece (as is also noted on the bee house):  BOBs (blue orchard bee) are nothing like honeybees...honeybees are social.  One queen and thousands of female workers live together in colonies that can last for years.  Multiple generations of workers divvy up the jobs that keep the hive functioning.  BOBs are solitary, spending their entire lives alone except when they mate.  Mating is a male bee's only job...After a female mates, her only job for the rest of her adult life (about 20 days) is providing for her offspring -- usually between seven and 12 in orchards.  She collects pollen and nectar, forms it into a wad, places it in an aboveground hole and lays an egg on the mixture.  Then she walls it in with mud, never to see her offspring...Any loss of a BOB female matters: it permanently reduces the current year's pollination workforce and diminishes next year's crew because fewer eggs are laid.  The loss of one honeybee, in contrast, is trivial because a healthy colony generates tens of thousands of workers across a year.  

Courtesy Scientific American

   Okay, I mentioned bees before, about how their colonies are still collapsing (still averaging between 30-45% each year since 2007 with neocotinoids largely suspected and many now widely in use by the average home gardener), my allergic reaction to their stings (the most recent sting on my wrist took about a week for the swelling to completely disappear, a cosmetic reaction but a serious one if that sting were to happen on my throat which is why is do carry adrenaline injectors to guard against possible anaphylaxis), and how I just love bees and wasps despite it all (their gentleness captivates me).  So along those lines, did I mention that for the most part wild bees (in particular the mason bees) are non-aggressive and don't sting?  In Europe, farmers get a threefold to fourfold increase of European Osmia bees out of their orchards every year...European orchards tend to be smaller, contain a mix of fruit species and have a variety of weeds that bloom around them at various times.  Those factors help bees live out their full adult life span, so they can lay many eggs.  In California, large, weed-free, monocrop orchards provide only two to three weeks of one type of bloom -- insufficient for maximum egg laying.  Fungicides and pesticides can further reduce the number of progeny that an orchard produces (this taken from the original article in Scientific American; the link above takes you to the updated piece saying that funding for commercially producing the mason bee has since been cancelled).  The average rental for a colony of honeybees is about $167 per box or colony so you can add up the cost of a semi-truck load of colonies; the mason bees' cost would be about half that (full disclosure, I bought 3 boxes so come winter I'll see just how many solitary bees took to finding a new place to call home for their future generations...did I mention that many bees bury themselves in the ground for winter?).

   So why would I do that, buy homes for bees when I'm so allergic?  Was it being altruistic?  Was it trying to help those three species that pollinate crops (only two of those are allowed in California, one being the honeybee); was it just wanting to see a wild bee that doesn't bite or sting (but the bite of a ladybug is quite painful). Beekeeping, that is raising colonies in your backyard for honey production, has only been legal in the past few years for many cities (Los Angeles only made it legal in 2015, overturning a law that made it ILlegal in 1879); but it turns out that city bees gather pollen from many different sources and those sources vary by city.  In Boston, it's the suman, linden, and apple trees; in Washington, D.C. it's cedar, clover, and Egyptian grass; and in Portland it's the sweet chestnut, rose, and begonia.  Other cities such as San Francisco find them buzzing about pine and eucalyptus trees (that city has never had restrictions on raising bees).  But here was one more discovery, Dunning-Kruger.

   Put simply, that effect is named for a trait of what you do and don't know.  One example I see is in tennis, most players scrambling to get a wide shot and missing it badly (to my eyes, Roger Federer seems to regularly take only a few steps and stop when he realizes he that the ball will be out of his reach, something few other players appear to do); that might not be the best example so here is how they tested the bees, said Popular Science: In a recent experiment led by Andrew Barron, associate professor in biological sciences at Macquarie University in Australia, researchers trained honeybees to determine which of two horizontal lines was above or below the other.  Correct answers triggered a sugar-syrup reward.  Mistakes drew a bitter fluid. Barron next placed the lines side by side, making a correct answer impossible.  In response, many bees flew away.  Shrewdly, they knew they didn’t know enough to get a treat.  The mystery is how they do things like this with so little to work with, Barron says.  We humans lack that ability.

    So off I go for my annual eye exam, not so much for testing my vision but to watch for the possibility of glaucoma and to follow my drusens, those pesky particles that gather like cholesterol deposits on the back of your eye (if they get too close to your macula it will lead to macular degeneration).  Some of my drusens are quite far away, something my doc thinks are "familial" drusens or particles I was born with; but some are patiently planted near my macular (as a rule, they don't go away; supplements such as lutein and zeaxanthin flood the market so check with your eye doc or pharmacist before jumping into the unregulated herbal/vitamin market).  I was told that taking such supplements can help hold those drusens at bay and part of my yearly exam is having the back of my inner eye photographed (an inexpensive test where a laser takes a quick picture allowing you to see the health of your optic nerve, macula and any stray drusens that might be accumulating; each year's photos are stored in the computer so that they can be compared side-by-side...in my case, the drusens are staying put and not building).

   There is much to discover...all around and inside us.  I discovered that of our twelve cranial nerves, four are dedicated exclusively to the eyes (even those who are or become blind); later on I would find that horses have more facial muscles than dogs (yes, horses can raise their eyebrows in an expressive gesture as dogs do); and that there are 20,000 different species of bees.  Admittedly, I've seen a few bee types but not those small black mason bees.  With any luck I'll discover something else that is new later this year, a mud-packed home quietly housing a host of wild bees...life anew, for me and for the bees.