Bees knees

I just finished eating a delicious plum that I bought from our local fruit stand (a co-op outfit). It was incredibly sweet, and probably nutritious. It reminded me of the day I bought it, when I saw a halved water melon on the table which was generously feeding about six or seven bees, arranged in a neat circle, as if the bees were having a meeting.

There was a time, when I was a mere lad, that I might have shooshed the bees away from the melon, or at least resented them for alighting on a melon meant for humans.


Not this time. I was glad to see them there. I have since learned that bees are such an important part of our food system that if they go extinct, so do we. We depend so much on their pollinating behavior.

It brought to mind the diseases that are threatening bees, though that isn't as dire as it appeared to be a couple of years ago. But I worry sometimes about the genetic engineering going on these days. They have potatoes that produce their own bt, an organic pesticide used by organic farmers. They produced corn a few years ago that unexpectedly proved deadly to passing monarch butterflies. Sure, they're a little more careful after that wake up call, but when you mess with DNA and such, trying to improve the plant, sometimes you get good results and sometimes you get surprises. They should be especially careful about trying to develop plants that are toxic to insects, seems to me, since insects are also our friends.

I read a book recently (The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan) that compares our current obsession with the Russet Burbank potato - the one that we like to bake and make long pretty french fries from - with the potatoes grown in Ireland in the 1800's. It was the Lumper, a nice potato that they reproduced solely by cutting the pieces and putting them in the ground, thus guaranteeing the same potato, genetically speaking, as all the years before. Meanwhile, a fungus evolved called the Phytophthora infestans which the potato had no resistance to. And since the good people of Ireland were only growing the one kind of potato, the result was a famine. No variety in the gene pool, you see.

I probably shouldn't worry so much, since there's not much I can do about it, and also since these things rarely go as predicted anyway. But I sure appreciated those bees, and I didn't mind at all that they were having their board meeting on that melon.

Of course, it wasn't my melon.