 News: POLLINATORS IN PERIL: THE CHALLENGE Bees and butterflies are making headlines these days and the news is not good. Bees are dying from a mysterious ailment coined “colony-collapse disorder” (CCD). Honeybees and native bees are both disappearing. The monarch butterfly population has declined by as much as 80% in the last decade. Why is this happening and is there anything we can do about it? The GCA Conservation Committee is exploring these problems and offering ideas for garden club members to make a difference - beginning in their own backyards. Bees As gardeners we know that bees are the most beneficial insects in our gardens. They pollinate our fruits, vegetables and flowers. In fact over one-third of the world’s crop production is dependent on bee pollinators.  If a grocery removed all food dependent on pollinators from its produce department, a lot would disappear. Of 453 items, 237 were removed --including lemons, apples, zucchini, onions, cucumbers, broccoli - and many more. We know our bees are in trouble. Beginning in 2006, beekeepers noticed that their honeybees were dying en masse and scientists began to study and identify CCD. Eight years later bees are still dying and the reasons are mysterious and probably a combination of factors. Although CCD has received a lot of recent news coverage, the bee population has actually been in decline over the past fifty years. We now have half the managed hives in the United States compared to 1945. The reason is that our farming practices changed after World War II. We stopped planting cover crops like alfalfa and clover which return nitrogen to the soil. Instead, we started to use synthetic fertilizer. We also began the widespread use of herbicides to kill weeds – many of which had provided flowers for the bees. We also began to grow monocultures - a single crop or plant species over a wide area and for a large number of consecutive years. Ironically, our country’s vast farmlands have become an agricultural food desert for bees. In their effort to discover the cause of CCD, researchers have focused on a new class of chemical pesticides called neonicitonoids. These pesticides seem to have an adverse affect on the nervous system of bees and other insects. {The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, has placed a two-year restriction on the use of three pesticides belonging to the neonicitonoid family}. The evidence remains unclear, however that, neonics as they are called, are the sole culprit. Bees are also susceptible to mites and viruses. Most likely all of these factors: disease, pesticide use, and loss of habitat are putting not only our honeybees, but also our native bee population, at risk. Although we’ve depended on non-native honeybees to pollinate our crops for decades, we may need to turn to native pollinators to augment the transportable honeybee industry. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation (www.xerces.org) has launched an educational program called, “Bring Back the Pollinators.” Its publication, Attracting Native Pollinators: Protecting America’s Bees and Butterflies, focuses on four groups of native pollinating insects: bees and wasps, butterflies and moths, flies, and beetles. Compared to honeybees, native bees pollinate squash, watermelon, apples, cherries and blueberries more effectively than honeybees. There are over 4,000 different species of native bees, but they, too, are disappearing. Their decline, like the honeybees, is likely due to pesticide use, loss of habitat, and disease. Last summer more than 50,000 bumblebees died in Oregon when linden trees were sprayed with dinotefuran (also know as Safari) in a Target parking lot. This pesticide belongs to the chemical group neonicotinoids. Monarch Butterflies “But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force.” - Rachel Carson, Letter to Dorothy Freeman, September 10, 1963 In the last fifteen years our once ubiquitous monarch butterfly population declined by eighty percent. Monarchs feed on only one plant -- milkweed (Asclepias). Milkweed is the only host plant for the Monarch's reproduction. Milkweed was once commonly found in meadows, farmland, roadsides and pastures. Now, due to urban sprawl, commercial farming, spraying of herbicides, and mowing, entire habitats of milkweed have disappeared. Vast monoculture crops like corn and soybeans are being bred for herbicide tolerance. The widespread use of Glyphosate, a weed killer, has resulted in the emergence of a dozen herbicide-tolerant super weeds. (None of them are milkweed). As a result, farmers now spray five times more weed killer on their crops than they did ten years ago. Farmlands have suffered a 58% decline in milkweeds – and an 81% decline in monarchs from 1999 to 2012. “Saving monarchs is about more than monarchs,” says Chip Taylor, the executive director of Monarch Watch, based at the University of Kansas. “It’s saving all the species with whom they share the same habitats, especially the pollinators whose service provides the food for other species.”  From Garden Club of America 2014
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What would our early sisters say if they saw this amazing new GCM website? Can you imagine Caroline Kissel, our founder, asking her gardener to set up her new Apple laptop in her rose garden so she can write her latest blog? She and Gustav were quite the gardeners and he kept a daily journal documenting life on their farm. Their journals are now housed in the archives of the Morris County Historical Society at Acorn Hall.
Applause all around to Kathryn and her Committee who helped create and design this impressive website. I love the fact that you can read Helen’s marvelous GCM history book online. I am thrilled the Grapevine is there for you in case like me, you accidentally delete it from your inbox. In one hundred years our daughters will explore our website (how big will that cloud be by then) and will really get to know us: our projects, our programs and our fundraisers. They will see photos of us and what we wore at our plant sale and even at our social events. They will learn what motivated us and what challenged us. Perhaps their concerns will be much the same as the ones we face today. This site will be our own archive. What I am certain won’t change in 100 years will be the powerful force of God’s great earth which brings us all together. It is my wish that each of us today (and in 100 years) may share that life-long commitment to GCM and we savor the treasured friendships and joy which grow from a love of gardening and the environment. Love, Alice |
Alice Cutler
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Member of The Garden Club of America since 1917
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