It's spring. My yard has been blooming for well over a month now. The flowering plum has moved on from blooming to leafing, the lilac blooms are fading, but the lavender is out in force, the various thymes are in full bloom, the roses are popping out, and the beauty bushes are covered in flowers.

But something is missing.

Normally, there are thousands of bees out there. Normally, the beauty bush actually sways as the bees move around it. Normally, a veritable army of happy, fuzzy bumble bees are all over the rosemary and lavender (my avatar is a bumble who was hard at work right outside my front door).

So far this year, I have seen four or five bumbles and maybe three ambers. A few days ago, I saw one little guy shaped like an amber, but a dishwater color that normally isn't here -- I don't know if he was a discolored amber or another variety.

So, the murder hornets were found a hundred miles north of here, and so far, only two of them. There have been stories of people poisoning entire colonies of good bees (like as far away as Kansas) in an ignorant and pointless attempt to stave off the murder hornets. I doubt that's happening here.

The bees are just missing.

Seventy-five percent of our food relies on bee pollination.

Anyone else seeing (or not seeing) missing bees?

This is not good.

I am not sure, I usually don't spend that much time outside, but now (bc of corona) I'm out in my yard all the time. I am not seeing a lot of bees, but I don't have anything to compare it to, and we don't have lots of flowering plants.

Here are some of my usual visitors:







They stick the pollen they collect into their elbows. (Bees don't have pockets.)

I didn't have many bees in my garden for the last two summers, but I haven't lived here long enough to know whether this was normal. The result? Teeny, tiny squash because they were barely pollinated.

I've seen quite a number of them this spring around the blooms on our pear trees and in the flowering weeds in our back yard and in my garden. I'm trying a new approach to keeping the fenced-in area around my raised beds neat-ish. Instead of weed-eating everything, I've tried to get ahead of the grass with hand-weeding and give the flowering weeds a head start. Some of them are quite lovely. Yesterday, I noticed my first tradescantia, and there have been oxalis, dandelions (of course), and some low-growing flowers that I think are native to the prairie that got torn up a hundred years ago.

I also planted clover seeds that are coming up nicely. I hope they crowd out some of the grass, thus keeping the weed-eating down. The bees should be attracted by the clover.

I'm afraid that I'll see a drop-off in bees soon, because it may mean that the agricultural land around us is being sprayed with something that kills them. Fingers crossed.

That doesn't sound good.

We have plenty locally. I actually wanted to record the humming sound under my crab apple tree.

One year, they were absent though. Some problem with the local hives. Scary. But they came back.

I’m curious if the department of agriculture publishes colony rental prices.

I remember the all the concern about colony collapse disorder but later read that in had little aggregate effect on actual prices (ergo supply) of bees

A couple of days after pj started this thread I found a deceased bumblebee on the patio.

But it seems that bees are in good shape around here.

I had raspberry flowers. Then the bees showed up. Lots of bees.

Now I have raspberries.

I'm seeing a lot of wasps, but no bees since early spring, when there were a bunch of them around a pear tree.

The wasps are mostly around the blackberry vines, but they're in the vegetable garden and I understand that wasps eat a lot of garden pests, so I do have a few helpful garden insects.

I've got one mature squash plant so far, and I'm having about 50/50 luck on hand-pollinating--the first two squash grew to mature size this week, and two little stunted ones shriveled up and fell off.

I don't see a lot of bees. I don't think they like the pesticides.

PJ nice photos

Plenty of bees here

Jf

Much like a famous "Black Mirror" episode involving robotic bees (except there they were also used for targeted murder), an experiment is ongoing in Israel using mechanical bees for pollination.

Israeli robotic bees

I see Walmart obtained a patent for mechanical bees in 2017, but not long afterwards there was considerable criticism in the scientific community arguing such a technique would be dangerous in the long run. Don't know how the Israelis dealt with these concerns.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/...ii/S0048969718321909]Dangers of mechanical pollination

"The History of Bees" comes to mind.
A rather dystopian read