you don't know what you've got till it's gone
I've added something new to my morning routine - shower, eat breakfast, check email, brush teeth, pollinate, get dressed, do hair, do makeup. If you guessed that pollinate was the recent addition, you're right.
When growing fruit, tomatoes in my case, indoors the absence of bees and other pollinators is an issue. Without spreading the pollen from one flower to another, tomatoes will not grow. The pollination process is not very complicated - I basically poke my finger in all the flowers that are open, starting and ending with the same flower. Seems to do the trick, as tomatoes are developing on my plants.
Having to take time to pollinate, water, and fertilize my indoor garden simply because it is indoors and isolated from the natural environment really exemplifies the extent of the natural processes that we traditionally depend on in the production of food. For the most part, humanity has supplemented or replaced many ecosystem services, such as fertilization and irrigation, by relying on technological innovation and finite resources (such as fossil water and fossil fuels) in order to increase yield. But pollination is one ecosystem service we haven't yet replaced and that we rely on tremendously. To think that our current food supply depends intrinsically on the activity of insects, largely bees, and other pollinators is humbling.
Humans are at the top of the food chain, but we rely extensively on the links in the chain that extend right to the bottom. Pollination is a prime example.
In contemplating the importance of bees, a verse from a well-known Joni Mitchell song entered my thoughts:
Hey farmer farmer
Put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!
Dont it always seem to go
That you dont know what youve got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Combined with the recent discovery that bees are on the decline for reasons yet to be fully understood, reading the lyrics to the song left me feeling ... nostalgic. Nostalgic in the sense of "a bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past." Partly because this is a song from my childhood and reminds me of hot summer afternoons on the porch with family and partly because I find myself mourning the loss of the bees in nature (the latter being a feeling in direct conflict with my phobia of bees and other insects with stingers) resulting from what is referred to as colony collapse disorder.
If human activity is causing the decline of the bees, I hope that we, as a society, have the common sense to rectify the situation. Loosing the bees seems like a case of not really knowing what we've got till it's gone. Pollinating ten tomatoes plants manually is one thing - pollinating all crops without help from bees is quite another.
