An unkempt stretch of tall grass, wildflowers and weeds in front of a train station doesn't look like much — but it may be crucial to solving one of the world's biggest environmental puzzles.

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The phenomenon of honey bee die offs is well known at this point and so are many of the causes. The use of neonicotinoids is still permitted in North America and it contributes to honeybee declines where there is heavy agriculture. The spread of bee parasites and diseases propagated by the practice of migratory pollination on an industrial scale is also hurting bee populations.

The bees will probably adapt to the new diseases and the use of neonicotinoids will be adjusted to minimize the harm to the bees, but there is one thing that bees can’t adapt to . . . habitat loss.

Honeybees have proven to be very resilient and have learned to thrive everywhere in the world where there is a long enough growing season and enough rainfall to make flowering plants. The problem is that people also like to use the same kinds of land for agriculture, industry, and building housing.

As far as the bees are concerned, an acre of corn is no better than an acre of asphalt. In order to thrive, bees need pollen and nectar that comes from overlapping bloom periods spread out over the entire growing season. Only wild land full of trees and wildflowers can provide what the bees need.

Thankfully, we can easily make room for bee habitat without tremendous effort on our part. It mostly comes from not doing the harmful things that we have become accustomed to doing – mowing and spraying.

Clever Dutch Beekeeper

Deborah Post founded Honey Highway so she could do her part to help save the bees. Post lives about 40 miles southwest of Amsterdam in a rural community. When the honey bees in her apiary began dying off, she began to research the cause.
“Bees and insects have no food because everything is green, everything is grass,” she said of her property surrounded by dairy farms.
Post said the Dutch government identified a decline in beekeeping, the use of pesticides and fertilizers, invasive pests, and a shortage of food and habitat as contributors to the decline of bees.
With a new highway being built in the area in 2015, she pitched to government and developers to allow her to sow wildflowers along the sides of the road that would typically be left with only gravel or grass. The experiment was a success.
The bees living in 11 hives on her family’s property are thriving, she said, as are the wildflowers despite an unusually hot and dry summer.

What should we do?

I have a long drive through rural Virginia to and from work every day. In a lot of ways, it is ideal honeybee habitat. That probably explains why my hives have been relatively healthy even when 60% of the managed bee colonies died last winter.

There is a lot more that we can do, though. One of the best ideas is just a change to the maintenance practices on the median strips in divided highways. The current practice is mowing two or three times a year during the growing season, which encourages the formation of a dense stand of grass and prevents flowering plants from blooming.

It would be far better if we could switch to cutting once per year just before the growing season begins. The light brush that grows up during the summer is easy to cut when it is dormant in March, it provides valuable cover for wildlife over the winter, and it grows back quickly in the spring.

The big benefit, though, is that land that is mowed (or even burned) once per year in the early spring supports a very healthy variety of plants, including many different types of wildflowers.

Cheers, Professor Bromide