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'Mint' Condition
Honey bees love catmint as much as cats love catnip.
Fact is, catmint and catnip belong to the same family: the mint family or Lamiaceae. The family also includes such aromatic celebrities as peppermint, sage, thyme, lavender, basil and oregano.
So, when the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven opens Oct. 16 on Bee Biology Road, UC Davis campus, you'll see 13 catmint (Nepeta faassenii) plants sharing the garden with scores of other bee favorites.
It's a good choice. Catmint boasts colorful blue-lavender flowers and fragrant gray-green foliage. It's drought-tolerant. It was named Plant of the Year in 2007 by the Perennial Plant Association.Best of all, bees love it.
The Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven is a bee friendly garden. The site is located next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, west of the UC Davis campus. The haven will provide a year-around food source for bees and "bee" an educational experience for visitors. They can glean information about honey bees and what to plant in their gardens to attract bees.
If you already have catmint in your garden, you're one step ahead of everybody. And one wingbeat away from the bees.
This is one food source that will help our bees stay in "mint" condition.
Honey Bee
Nectaring
Caught in the Act
You may not know about Lavandula "Goodwin Creek Gray" but the honey bees do.
They love lavender.
That's one of the plants selected for the Haagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, a half-acre bee friendly garden being implemented near the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis.
The Goodwin Creek Gray, a cross between Lavandula dentata and Lavandula lanata is a hearty plant with lavender floral spikes and silvery-gray, sawtoothed leaves.
Ground preparation is under way, and the project should be completed and open to the public by Oct. 16.
A Sausalito team (landscape architects Ann Baker and Donald Sibbett, interpretative planner Jessica Brainard, and exhibit designer Chika Kurotaki) submitted the winning design (online).
The garden will provide a year-around food source for honey bees and create awareness for the plight of the honey bee. Visitors can glean ideas for their own bee friendly gardens.
The plants will include such bee favorites as lavender, sage, tower of jewels, swamp sunflower, catmint, angelica, clover, California buckwheat, California honeysuckle, woodbine honeysuckle, passionflower vine, globe thistle, coral bells, dwarf plumbago, dwarf oregano, purple dome aster, Mexican daisy, silver carpet aster, deer weed and mother of thyme.
With such a smorgasbord to choose from, it will be interesting to see which blossoms the bees go to first.
I'm betting on four: lavender, sage, catmint and tower of jewels.
Caught in the Act
Hoop Houses
Nature Meets Art
Butterflies, dragonflies, ladybugs and honey bees.
What exists in nature is replicated in art.
We sculpt them, draw them and paint them. We create their images on everything from clothing and jewelry to quilts and stepping stones. We never tire of their shapes, colors, textures and the extensive variety.
Many replicas find their way into exhibits at county fairs.
We saw more than a dozen "insects" today in McCormack Hall at the Solano County Fair, Vallejo. A butterfly morphs into a quilt. Another butterfly yields its shape for a stepping stone. A honey bee transforms into a keychain. Dragonfly and ladybug decorations glide and crawl among the exhibits.
The 60th annual event, set July 22-26, is themed "Raisin' Steaks" but it's also raising awareness of nature.
And why not?
Insects reign supreme in sheer variety and abundance. Scientists have recorded some million insects to date. Millions of others await identification. In total volume, there could be as many as 200 million insects for every human on the planet. They're all around us.
Interesting that we seek beneficial insects for our gardens, but the "revolting ones" we set aside for horror movies.
Butterfly decoration
Butterfly quilt
Stepping Stone
Keychain
Just Bee-Cause
Sometimes you don't think about the declining bee population when you see a pollen-dusted honey bee rolling around in a poppy blossom, but colony collapse disorder (CCD) is still with us.
Pollinator protection is a must.
That's why we were glad to see the U. S. House of Representatives yesterday pass HR 2997, the "Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act" for fiscal year 2010.
The vote was 266-160, and now the bill is off to the U.S. Senate for approval.
Tom Van Arsdall, director of public affairs for the Pollinator Partnership, sent us Cong. Alcee L. Hastings' amendments to the bill. Hastings represents Florida's 23rd District in the House.
"Hastings Amendments Bee-Come Part of Ag Appropriations Bill--Provisions Increase Funds for Pollinator Protection," Van Arsdale wrote in his e-mail subject line, with a teaser message that said "bee-low and attached."
Basically, Hastings' amendments increase funding for research into pollinator decline and CCD.
"Congress must continue to secure the necessary funding to proactively address pollinator decline," Hastings said in a press release issued by his office. "The fact of the matter is that pollinators are responsible for vast portions of our food supply and exported crops, which makes their decline an urgent matter of economic and food security. Without an adequate supply of natural pollinators, many crops would require hand pollination, which would dramatically raise crop prices."
Yes, one-third of the American diet is pollinated by honey bees. In California alone, more than 100 crops depend on bee pollination services.
The tanked economy has us all scrambling to make ends meet, but it's scary to think what the loss of bees would do to our food supply.
Bee-cause that would be disastrous.
Honey Bee
Up Close
Cool It!
The bees are dropping like flies--in swimming pools all over northern California during this triple-digit heat wave.
Honey bees collect water to aircondition their hive. They sip from bird baths, dripping faucets, water-splashed plants and even wet laundry hanging on the line. They return to their colony where they release droplets of water. The buzz of hundreds of wings fanning the hive sounds like hundreds of super-charged fans or a ramped-up swamp cooler.
Cool it!
"This hot weather is really hard on the bees," said bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey, manager of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis.
Unfortunately, bees searching for water can fall into swimming pools and perish. Last weekend we netted about a dozen bees from our pool. All survived but one. Another looked like a goner. The water-soaked bee stood on the net--nothing but net--all night long. The next morning she raised her head, spun her wings and buzzed off.
Another rescue.
Really, I'm not into bee-ing a "bee lifeguard" or admininistering "bee CPR."
Not yet.
Thirsty Bee
Exhausted
Let Me Bee
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