Here’s the short talk, recently posted online (thanks Burke!) It is called “Telling the Bees: How Bees Went from Gods to Slaves.” See all the talks via the link.

(The Burke’s excellent exhibit runs through June 10, 2012! Details here.)

They are dark-colored (hence “blue”) and with a foraging radius of about 300 feet diameter from the nest, they work very well in contained gardens and orchards (hence “orchard”).

Mason bees are under extreme duress just like honey bees, also suffering from loss of habitat, pesticides, new diseases and pests and other stressors. People like Missy Anderson are working to build populations of mason bees in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere.

Keeping mason bees can involve a bunch of work: they don’t require inspections like honey bees, and overall are less labor-intensive: but the cocoons do need to be checked for disease and cleaned, refrigerated overwinter (the bees won’t emerge if the temperature isn’t right, and this guarantees they won’t come out on a warm day in December), and situated properly in the spring.

You want some mason bees for your garden and don’t want to deal with the maintenance (and a bunch of extra stuff in your fridge all winter)? Missy makes it easy: rent the bees! You can rent them direct from her; all you have to do is pick them up, hang the nest of bees, and bring them back at the end of the season. We can also do it for you (costs more than going direct to Missy).

The bees are in the big tube (shown on top). In the spring, the box of nesting spaces (empty paper straws or a block of wood with empty spaces, both shown) is nailed to the house or hung on a tree (something that won’t shift) and the big tube is placed inside. The bees emerge, mate, and then the queens lay eggs in the nesting spaces (one queen per space), sealing each egg with mud and a little pollen. The eggs pupate and become cocoons, staying that way all winter until spring comes around again.

The article provides a smattering of facts about Colony Collapse disorder, and minimizes them by saying that food prices have remained the same, and that crop yields have gone up. and everything’s going to be fine. Why? Because “beekeepers have been able to rejuvenate their hives each year.”

That’s true but misleading. Beeks are splitting hives as fast as possible, buying nucleus colonies and shelling out for packages (the prices of which have skyrocketed). Those new colonies however are a quick fix and doomed to fail. Can you say “housing bubble”?

The fact is that 75% of all the bee colonies in the nation are trucked to California to pollinate almonds early in the year. With hundreds of thousands more acres of almonds planned, what will that crop require? Answer: bees shipped in from Australia, China, and other countries. Bees are not a crop like tomatoes that comes up every year. They are living colonies that mature over generations and seasons. They self-select for certain traits given their habitat and geography. The use of them in a multinational business capacity is clearly destroying the system.

How the orchards get pollinated in China.

Food prices might not be responding to the pollinator crisis yet: they are getting plenty of subsidies from the Food Bill, for instance. Meanwhile, federal agencies are–this very week–considering the approval of a pesticide that is even more powerful than Roundup. All these efforts are taxing the production system–starting with the small pollinators–to the limit. In China, pear orchards are now pollinated by humans wielding cigarette butts tied to sticks. Our capacity for food production is not unlimited.

The real answer should be providing healthy diets for the bees, and keeping residential colonies on the orchards. Then the bees can make pollinating the crops part of a healthy lifecycle. It’s better for the crops and farmers too.

According to a study from the Ecological Society of America, “Canola growers who leave 30 percent of their fields wild, allowing weeds and native plants to grow untended near or interspersed among their crops attract more native pollinators, achieve considerably higher yields in canola seed, and as a result generate higher incomes than those who plant 100 percent of their fields with canola.

That’s something worth CNN Money’s attention, and that of the general public too. Things have to change.

We’re thrilled and a little nervous to be presenting tonight at the Neptune Theater, for the Burke Museum and STG’s event “Short Takes: What the World Eats.” Ten very short talks and slideshows will range from NW coastal native foods to dumpster diving to women farmers in the developing world. And bees. (This painting from Breugel, “The Beekeepers,” is from 1567 and will be part of our talk.) Maybe see you there!

Why, hello there. This is our very first post in the synthetic web of the world. Thanks to design guru Shaun Swick for creating the site, and to Dan Smith for the artwork. And thanks to you, too, for visiting! We look forward to spending time talking flowers, honey, bees, and how to support the real and fertile earth.