Urban gardens are impacting winter bumblebee hibernation

Without food and resources, bee colonies typically die off in winter with just the queen in hibernation. But in Britain, that’s changing. A study that was published in 2010 has showed that bumblebees have plenty to eat in the winter in our gardens and parks. The study team, led by Ralph Stelzer, placed active hives into heated greenhouses in winter and allowed bees to forage (Stelzer, R.J., L. Chittka, M. Carlton, and T.C. Ings. 2010. Winter active bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) achieve high foraging rates in urban Britain. PLoS ONE 5: e9559). Only cultivated ornamental garden plants were blooming at that time. The researchers found that there was plenty of high quality nectar and pollen available to bees even though it was the dead of winter. There have been reports of bees feeding on plants in winter when they should be hibernating, providing evidence that bees are establishing winter generations in southern England. Our gardens are indeed changing the world. The Stelzer, et al, article is available online at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0009559

Gas Works Park, Seattle, WA USA

Four Fields

"Without fields--no us. Without us--no fields. So it has come to seem to me. 'This green plot shall be our stage,' says Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Fields were there at our beginning and they are growing still. Earth half-rhymes with life and half-rhymes with death. Every day, countless incarnations of our oldest history are played out in a field down any road from wherever we are. Yet these acres of shaped growing earth, telling our shared story over and over, are so ordinary, ubiquitous and banal that we have--mostly-- stopped noticing them as anything other than substrate or backdrop, the green crayon-line across the bottom of every child's drawing. It is in the nature of all commonplaces that they are overlooked, in both senses of the word: fields are everywhere but we don't see them for they are too familiar and homely; being the stage and not the show, they are trodden underfoot, and no one seeks them out, no one gives a sod. For Walt Whitman, prairie-dreamer of the great lawn of men, grass fitted us and suited; it was a 'uniform hieroglyphic'. It grew and stood for us and, because it goes where we are, we tread where it grows. Yet because it meant everything it could easily mean nothing."  --Four Fields, Tim Dee