I am done with great things and big plans. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillaries oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest of monuments of pride.  —William James

Social transformation, I learned at my retreat this past weekend, means working in the “little way” sometimes. Small, incremental changes. Not big and grand.

That is what happened last Thursday as we sat down around a long board table of City officials to talk about creating a Bee City USA.

There was clearly resistance and worry of being “forced to change” how we do business with the application of chemicals on our public spaces.

I personally hoped for a point of collaboration.

I did my pollinator friendly presentation, stated my concern about loss of habitat due to the herbicide RoundUP, and the insecticides that are harming bees— neonicitinoids in particular. A nerve poison, if you will, for insects.

One by one, each department stated their integrated pest management plan. To the surprise of my colleagues and I, those officials continued to work towards the best possible IPM, with regulations imposed by state and federal laws.

We all noted that one of the biggest unregulated culprits were backyard sprayers, with over the counter poisons. Your average homeowner who grabs a gallon of RoundUP or any other given pesticide or herbicide at Lowe’s or Home Depot on the weekend and sprays indiscriminately. We all agreed upon increased collaboration to educate the public about this danger.

It was a start. Though we did not come away with a resolution, we did get up from the table with an agreement to work together towards the best practices and health of the city’s open spaces. We did agree to sit again in January and talk about the specifics of a resolution.

Little by little, reaching out across the things that divide us..

This past weekend I also learned about a book which talks about “tickling” that part of your brain where memory and emotional responses are lodged (Tickle Your Amygdala by Neil G. Slade). The amygdala is that primal brain where autononomic responses associated with fear and fear conditioning are located.  But it is also the place where the emotion of pleasure is experienced. “Tickling the amygdala”  can turn on the best parts of the brain towards a good end, rather than keep us stuck in fight or flight.

My teacher reminded me that social transformation doesn’t happen, usually can’t happen, if people are constantly in that frozen or aggressive stage of panic, terror and fear. If instead, you begin in that comfort zone where civilities and values are exchanged and shared, bit by bit we can move towards change— like those rootlets in William James’ image…streeeetching towards a new world by millions of small acts of courage and collaboration across our differences.

The attacks in Paris, France reminded me again that terror will destroy the web of trust quicker than anything. It will erode the relationships that lubricate civil society which allow us to live together and work towards the healthiest world possible.

Bees teach us about social cooperation. They illustrate selfless acts to bind up and further the commonwealth of the collective. Though they also engage in heartless and cruel acts at times, the ongoing thrust of the colony is towards survival and thriving of the whole. May it bee so.

This week, Thursday, November 12, I go before the City of Albuquerque to begin the work of collaboration towards a pollinator friendly city. The heads of all departments that apply chemicals will be present. Parks and Rec, Open Space, Environmental Health, and Solid Waste.

It is daunting and hopeful. I, along with the President of the NM Beekeepers Association, a Bernalillo County Extension horticulturist, and a consultant from About Listening will begin the journey of a thousand miles, by taking this single step together.

I ask you, the reader, to light a candle and shine some goodwill on us this Thursday, 10am-noon.

Wendell Berry, the great writer poet and farmer gave a lecture at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It was entitled: “It All Turns on Affection” , based upon E.M. Forster’s novel and movie, Howard’s End.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/24/wendell-berry-delivers-annual-jefferson-lecture-humanities

In his speech, Berry told about his grandfather’s great love of that Kentucky land he nurtured back to health and hung onto during the Great Depression. He would’ve lost it if Berry’s father, a lawyer, hadn’t fronted the money to save it.

Berry talks about “boomers” and “stickers”.  He got those words from Wallace Stegner, an important mentor.  Boomers “are those who pillage and run…make a killing and end up on easy street“. This might have originally been a certain kind of person with ambition and the willingness to step on as many heads possible to get to the top. But, in today’s world, it seems that those persons have now been swallowed up or subsumed into a huge machinery of multi-national conglomerates intent on the bottom line of profit.

Stickers on the other hand, are those who “settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made in it.” Stickers, according to Berry, are motivated by affection and the life they love, hoping to preserve the land and remain upon it. This is in stark contrast to a motivation of greed, desire for money, property and power.  (It All Turns On Affection, NEH 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, April 23, 2012, p.6) We often think of stickers as conservative “country bumpkins” stuck in rural quagmires. Yet, we owe them a debt of gratitude for our food. And for preserving land.

Berry’s lecture reminds me that if I go before a committee with my guns blazing, filled with political rhetoric and threats, I will only sow discord. I hope to speak instead from my heart—one full of affection and gratitude not only for the bees, but for all of life. Including humans.

Meanwhile.  May I grow only more sticker-like in my affinity for my community of insects and soils, trees and plants, water and air here in my little postage sized backyard. May they become more like kin whom I would protect at any cost.

I have lived here for a mere 12 years. My husband has lived on this piece of earth for 30 years continuously. After 10 years of blood, sweat and tears, we mechanically pulled out the bermuda grass, hauled away the landscape of rocks, contoured the land and created swales, finally planting food for our pollinators. It’s a start towards humbly taking our place in this land community that was formed billions of years before we got here.

Aldo Leopold (1887-1948),land conservationist, scientist, forester, writer, wrote, ‘In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it”. (Berry, Wendell, “It All Turns on Affection“. NEH 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, April 23, 2012, p. 15)

May it be so.

This week I am at a writing workshop in Louisville Kentucky. Since my writing project is about beekeeping, it often brings up bee jokes and bee references.  I was surprised to find a fellow beekeeper amongst our ranks during one of our morning writing exercises. It was a fiction piece, killer bees on the loose, and the triumph of the honeybees, saving the main character’s life. I had to wonder.

I had the chance to talk with Tim at happy hour that night. He talked fondly of his bees and his great affection for them. But he was no longer actively keeping bees. He had realized he was too busy to devote the time needed when they absconded at the end of one season. He was disturbed at the hive left behind in disarray. Likely the colony fell victim to varroa mites.

For every beekeeper, mites are a reality these days. It’s hard to know why or how this scourge exploded on the scene in the early 1990’s. Clearly bees were vulnerable, weakened by harsh practices of the industry, chemicals used in big ag and moving bees around the country for pollination. Varroa brought down even the hardiest stock of honeybees and grown men to their knees as they lost whole bee yards.

Varroa mites are microscopic parasites that infest the brood nest, attaching to the growing larvae and maturing honeybee. If the bee isn’t deformed, dying soon after it  emerges, the mite will eventually suck the living juice out of the bee, making life miserable.

These days bee keepers count “mite loads” with various tests, determining if a colony is heavily infested or if the mite load is something that a healthy hive can keep in check through hygienic practices and a healthy varied diet. Either way, if you bother to google the little beast, it is grotesque in all ways.

As a beekeeper, I am more aware of how important resilient, hardy mite-resistant queens and bee colonies are.  I have already treated my hives with essential oils of wintergreen and tea tree a few times this Autumn—in anticipation of winter.  We’ll see if they survive. This is the real litmus test. If the infestation has diseased the colony and weakened it beyond the point of resilience, you will have a hive of dead bees in the Spring.

At the end of happy hour, Tim shared a heartbreaking story with me. It was the early 90’s. He and his family lived in Southern Ohio. The Ohio State Agricultural Department had identified an AIDS-like disease that infected and killed bees. It came from the varroa mite which now was raging it’s way across the nation. It was decimating the livelihood of thousands of beekeepers who trucked their hives around the country to pollinate crops. The Ag Department mandated that all hives with varroa mites be burned.

Tim remembers that night vividly. His 10 year old son asked to go along. Tim tried to dissuade him, but his son was resolute. And so, they set off to the hives on the side of a rolling hill. Tim with his gasoline in hand and his son by his side. When they arrived, it was dark.  His son looked at him and said, “Dad, they are all in there aren’t they?”  Tim slowly nodded his head, “Yes”.  “So they will all be killed?” he persisted. “Yes son”.  “Dad, the bees didn’t do anything wrong, did they?”.

At this last question, Tim choked up. He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “It still gets me, even today”, he said.

These days, we know better.  Along with the bees, bee keepers have learned to live with varroa mites, seeking ways to strengthen their colonies genetically, just as they continue to evolve ways to rid themselves of mites. We are also waking up to the ways we have changed their habitat and climate in such unhealthy ways that they are suffering huge effects.

Now that we know better, I pray we do better by bees. Their struggle to live is our struggle.

This week I am in Ohio, staying in our old family farmhouse. When I arrived my parents were excited to tell me of a development that has rocked the neighborhood.  A young pig has become a local celebrity.  He was an escape artist from the weekly farm animal auction. He has been living down by the creek now for lo, a whole week.  Feral. You know a pig in these parts is not going to get by for very long without being chased down.  He is someone’s property.

But the masses who chased him became half-hearted and sullen after he eluded one after the other, running for his life from the humans who would catch him.

I named him Wilbur.

He immediately set up housekeeping next to the apple tree and the tomato plants—dripping harvest fruits at the end of the season.  Then he began to make his own garden.  His snout, a perfect plow, pried the grass up in huge chunks of sod as he turned it over for the tasty fat grubs. Protein for a hungry little pig, with no farmer to throw him slop. In a Swiss Mennonite community with gardens and flowerbeds as neat as pins, this is definitely grounds for dismissal. Or capture.

As the temperatures dropped to freezing, the good people of this community decided that the pig must be caught.  A wad of high school boys were rounded up.  As the Lord’s day waned, likely during the height of Sunday afternoon football, they set upon Wilbur, chasing him down until his little pig legs could no longer sufficiently carry him far away.  As he tired, they grabbed him. This I heard second hand, since I was not there as an eye witness.

Personally, I was always cheering for Wilbur in his off the grid, back to nature bid. I was fascinated by the instinct that immediately took hold, even after generations of pig ancestors in pens.  I thought that perhaps self-preservation was bred out of him.  But no, he quickly set about taking care of himself.  All he lacked was a kindly farmer or a 4-H child to provide him shelter and offer him some dignity.  As my organic farmer cousin wrote, whom I immediately emailed for possible solutions to Wilbur’s housing crisis: “It sounds like he/she could use a good home with some TLC. Animal behavior is a product of the environment that we put them in.“

I loved watching Wilbur root up grubs.  You’ve heard the phrase, “hog heaven”?  He was living out his full pig-ness.  Something we mostly deny animals in our culture.  Whether a cat stuck in a house all day, or a calf in a tiny pen, awaiting his executor.

So, you are wondering what this has to do with bees?

As an advocate for humane care of farm animals, I often compare my raising of honeybees to the domestic animals we care for.  Bees are considered livestock, after all.

However, bees are wild and independent enough, with a fierce sting, that will keep humans from domesticating them in quite the same way.  They evoke respect. Bees generally live out their bee-ness daily. They cannot be stopped from zooming out of the hive at first light to pollinate—orienting to sun and flower. They continue to mystify humans by their habits and behaviors, keeping us from utter and complete manipulation of them.  Now that colonies are collapsing, bee welfare is still somehow beyond our control. And we can also change our ways to support them.  I wonder if our main task in this day and age, if we want to become wise and loving with all our relations, is to let our non-human siblings teach us.

Wilbur, I was rooting for you.  I still am, wherever you are.  You have my respect.

If I were going to think like a bee, I would imagine bubbles above their heads as they raced off into the sunlit morning, their golden bodies shimmering.

“Maeve, there it is!  There’s that patch of flowers!”.

“What?  O yes, I see it.  Let’s go, Stella!”

“bzzzz. These flowers taste funny.  This nectar tastes a little bit like the inside of an ash tray, Maeve. What d’ya think?”

“You know, I don’t really care, Stella. There are so few flowers out there with nectar right now. It’s a nectar wasteland. It’s getting cold. I’m starving. I’ll take anything”.

Yes, just a tad anthropomorphic.  Macabre humor.  Maeve and Stella are bees drinking nectar with neonicotinoids, those lovely insecticides by the big boys—-manufacturers such as Syngenta and Bayer.  Bee deaths have been indicted by beekeepers and farmers in the European Unionand the the government has moved to restrict neonics, pending further research. (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-22335520).  It’s called the “precautionary principle”.

Tomorrow I go before the City Council to speak out about the possibilities of making Albuquerque a bee friendly city. http://www.beecityusa.org/

Yes, I’m going to have to do it. Along with the friendly bonhomie about those little movie stars, the bees, I’m going to have to name the elephant in the room.  Any city  willing to become friendlier to pollinators must look at it. We must fast forward to the 21st century and come out of the closet about….pesticides. Bees have become the poster children for their impact. As gratis pollinators, they are a major player in our food system.  We would be deluding ourselves if we think what harms the bees is absolutely benign for humans.

Some cities have actually done it.  They have managed to reduce or eliminate heavy pesticide use from RoundUp to Neonicotinoids, by using intensive mechanical means of removing plants (short hand for hiring people to pull weeds the good old fashioned way), to planting lots of new native pollinating plants and attracting beneficial bugs.  They’ve also gotten rid of the misguided idea that nature has to be nice, neat, manicured, domesticated looking. Perhaps they’ve come to some conclusion that weeds (like the much maligned dandelion) are actually fabulous pollinator habitat. Here’s a short list:

Ypsilanti Michigan, Takoma Park, MD, Ashville, N.C., Boulder, CO (no surprise there), Seattle, WA.

And most of those are places that actually have lots of rain and green space.

Wish me luck. Bzzz.

Bees, among other living beings on earth, are highly managed and manipulated by humans.  And still they assert themselves as wild, beyond our understanding, as seen by my last post on robber bees. Bees are a mystery, despite centuries of co-existence with them, observation and decades of scientific research.

Recently an article showed up on my front door which gave me pause. It was from a book called “Advice from Anastasia” by Vladimir Megre (Ringing Cedars Press), published in Russia, 1996, trans. in 2005 by Leonid Sharashkin. In it, Anastasia, a wise presence and communicator on behalf of the natural order of things, including bees, reminded the reader what it truly means to “think like a bee“.  She laid out the favorite dimensions of bees in the wild—a hollow tree cavity—-and how humans can replicate this if we must resort to keeping bees. Evidently the most private and non-invasive place for a bee to reside would be up on the roof, or in an attic, under the eaves or a canopy of a home, attached to the south wall, with plenty of ventilation.  There they can zip in and out to do their business, without botherment for human or insect.  Finally, she says, “Bees only sting when people act aggressively toward them, wave them off, become afraid or irritated…the bees feel this and will not tolerate the rays of any dark feelings.” (p. 85)

Animals instinctively mirror our human fears, aggressions, irritations, happiness, calmness, etc.  I see this with my domesticated cats all the time. And yet, we continue to try to dominate critters, rather than seek to learn from them and leave them to their own lives, as unhindered as possible.

This morning, I arose early to attend the NM Fish and Wildlife meeting at the Embassy Suites in Albuquerque. They were going to decide the fate of the Mexican Grey wolf reintroduction in this state, which has been repeatedly denied.  The favored uniform of the big men who decide the fate of prey and predators in New Mexico—— including cougars, bears, bobcats, and coyotes—– was 10 gallon cowboy hats and boots, a grey long sleeved shirt embossed with the lettering and emblem of NM Fish and Wildlife. They were there to report on such things as “Depredation and Nuisance Abatement”, likely racoons, skunks, snakes, coyotes, pigeons. You name it, most critters have human enemies.  They are just too inconvenient and frighteningly full of disease. There were updates on Shooting Ranges and how The State Game Commission can create even more access for hunters to wildlife areas.  There was the ongoing management of Pronghorn Antelope, which have been trapped and moved to lands in the South, even as Mountain Goats have been airlifted to the Jemez Mts. for reintroduction.  Meanwhile, our taxpayer dollars are used for watering areas in remote locations to slake the thirst of predators and prey alike in mean times.  We also pay for these same predators on public lands to be trapped, hunted and disposed of when their numbers grow too large for comfort. It is called “quotas” and profit.

As I have found with bees, once I begin to meddle, there can be no end to how I might disrupt or change the whole natural system, even the evolutionary track of the survival of the fittest.

Do I become misguided in my own beguilement of one species over another?

Do I lose perspective and respect of a creature’s wild nature as I anthropomorphize them?

It is something that troubles me as I reflect on my own relationship with wild and domesticated creatures alike.  As I try to care for or manage one, do I do the other a disservice e.g. feed the birds in my backyard, which then become easy prey for my cats, even as I snatch the doves from their jaws to take down to the Nature Rescue Center after they’ve been mauled? You know the drill.

Needless to say, I unintentionally end up creating a domino effect, sometimes a blizzard when I think I know enough, but really know so little. And so, in one small step, I’ve stopped feeding backyard birds from the feeders. I keep my cats enclosed. But I’m still feeding my bees.

William Longgood, who published a book about bees in 1985 that I think is quite brilliant wrote, “The world itself has changed while the bee has remained constant.  Many of earth’s natural contours have been move this way and that, gradually by natural forces and, abruptly, often violently, by man’s powerful machines, like a child’s sandbox and its ever-changing form.  Many species of plants and animals have been wiped out or are endangered.  We have degraded the earth and defiled the air, destroyed habitats and disrupted the delicate and irreplaceable ecosystems, imperiling the base on which life rests.  We are at war with nature, although we call it by euphemistic names: development, growth, progress, and that overused phrase, “The bottom line”, which places profits above all else. (The Queen Must Die. NY: NY, W.W. Norton Co, 1985), 228.

In the end, he sees the honeybee as a connection to that lost and neglected part of our being—the wildness of nature, which we insulate ourselves against at every turn. He ends on a hopeful note…”The bee is domesticated but not tamed.  She has not recognized man as her master; he subdues, manipulates, and beguiles her into working for him, but the bee remains what she has always been, part of nature, a part of ourselves forever lost….[providing] an enduring and hopeful message of life.” (p. 230, 234)

!Vivan las abejas! ! Que vivan! Long live the bees!

This past weekend I was involved in an epic battle.  As a lifelong pacificist, growing up in an Historic Peace Church, it felt base, ugly and brutal.  I found myself doing things I’d rather not report.  All in defense of my beehive.

Who knew these innocent, sweet, wondrous creatures could be so voracious?

But I will report on this, because I’m feeling confessional as I think back on the horror of it. I guess this is how wars get started. Fighting over scarce resources.

It was all my fault in the first place.

I had been merrily feeding my hives to tide them over this dry Autumnal season, since nectar is just not to be found. They get cranky when I feed them sugar water.  It just isn’t nectar—-full of the vitamins and amino acids and minerals they need. Kind of like humans, they become hyper, erratic, irritable and insatiable when the sugar is flowing through their little bodies. As they flooded out of the first hive and began to sting me, I literally dropped the bottle of honey in the hive, into the growing pool of honey. The bees were literally swimming and suffocating in honey.  What a way to die.

The second hive tolerated me opening them, since they had last been fed honey, not sugar water.  As I began to pour the honey, it moved rapidly towards the back entrance, which was sealed, but not airtight. Law of physics. Liquid moves gravitationally towards the earth. As the honey began to drip, no, pour around the closed door, running down the legs of the hive onto the ground, the hive began to buzz with tens of thousands of unknown, hungry bees.  My girls were happily sealed inside sipping their new epiphany of delight.  But to my dismay, it seemed I had begun the Fall food wars, as honeybees will readily sniff out any potential source of honey and rob it if needed. Fall is the worst, since bees are desperate to put up winter stores.
There was no way to stem the steady flow from inside, seeping and dripping outside.  Soon it had become a honey trough filled will tiny bee bodies lapping at the growing rivers of sweet elixir.

I watched for awhile.  The hordes began to gather around the entrance.  I shudder now to think of the warfare going on inside as my girls sent their first strike boots-on the-ground guards to fight off the invaders. Then as they grew weary, they sent in the national guard.  I could see bees grappling to death outside the hive, as wave after wave of intruders were kept at bay.  But they kept coming, bearding around the entrance to assure wave and wave of robbers entering the hive to pillage and plunder.   I was no stranger to this.  It happened to a hive of mine last winter when I was out of the country.  I came back to nary a single bee, only a pile of shredded wax below the doorway.  The robbers had chewed out all the winter reserves of pollen and honey, leaving my girls to flee for their lives.

It went on for hours.  My husband came home from a long week of work to Friday night chaos.  He was kind enough to start out holding the tools as I tried to shut down the entrance with mesh and entrance reducers.  He got stung below the eye and that was that. He retreated to the house, leaving me to do battle with my head/face veil and shorts.  Stupidly, I forgot all my bee protocol about how to cover oneself when going into a “hot hive” situation.  I threw on my head veil and waded in with short sleeves, flipflops and no gloves, desperate to stem the tide.  And the bees took advantage of my vulnerable skin.  Soon I was covered with stings.  Likely, 20.  Though I might embellish it to 40 or so. But as my adrenaline matched the bees frenzy, I didn’t really notice.  At least at that time.

I raced inside to google robbing behavior.  It suggested that one throw a wet sheet over the hive.  I did that.  The dark was encroaching. I got the garden hose and began to blast away at the swarm covering the entrance.  The bees became sullen and drenched, their wings plastered to their bodies as they clung desperately to the screening I had managed to attach. But they didn’t go away.  I lit incense and took a torch to those bees around the entrance.  It was all mutinous. We were all desperate.

Who knew what was going on inside the hive.

Hours later the swarms had begun to lessen. We were all battered and bruised by this horrible experience.  But the hive was saved. I soaked in an epsom salt/baking soda bath, nursing my stings.

The next morning, I went out to view the girls.  It was the peaceable kingdom.  Quiet.  Sunny.  Organized flight patterns in and out with pollen filling their legsacs.  They were getting adjusted to the layers of wood and screening covering their entrance.  It was definitely inconvenient. But they are resilient, if nothing else.

I can’t help but think of war zones.  How it starts.  How it unravels.  How it destroys and traumatizes every being involved. How do people and countries return to normal afterwards?  I have no easy answers.  It is troubling all around.  Bees are instinctual creatures. Humans have the power of reflection.

Let us choose against war.

Today I went down to the Albuquerque Bosque (which in Spanish means “forest”). It is a strip along the river, with one of the largest contiguous cottonwood forests in the U.S.

There I walked along the acequias—–an amazingly intricate web of waterways in the valley, connected to the Rio Grande.  It was created hundreds of years ago by Spanish settlers who wanted to irrigate their fields all along the river.

Today, it was a scorched earth. All the plants along the ditches were mowed down  or likely sprayed.  They were yellowed and dead. There was literally no plant life along the acequia banks. I was sickened.  My bees live near the river and I was counting on the Autumnal offerings of chamisa, asters, goldenrod, goatsheads and other plants to give my bees the last boost of pollen and nectar before winter sets in.I have been praying for weeks that they begin to flower, since I have been feeding my bees heavily to tide them over.  Sugar water is no substitute for the rich enzymes, amino acids, vitamins and minerals that the bees find in all plant pollens and nectars.  Their collective immune system becomes compromised, just like humans, when they are only fed a steady diet of white sugar.

Most people call the wild plants along the ditches and river, “weeds”.  When I called the City of Albuquerque, they said they regularly get calls from people who need for them “right now” to come take out those unsightly weeds near their homes.  So the City Environmental Department complies by bringing their herbicides to spray down the weeds. Or they bring in their heavy equipment to obliterate the weeds, as seen today near the river.

This is the dark side of beekeeping.  Bees and humans are all feeling the effects of RoundUp spray and RoundUp Ready seeds—-seeds that the chemical is actually injected into the seed itself, creating a systemic effect of toxicity.  Dr. Stefanie Seneff, a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has been researching glyphosate, a key ingredient in RoundUp for over 40 years. In recently published articles, she has shown that glyphosate binds to mercury and aluminum in the environment and conveys it to humans.  Her scientific findings as to how Glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in the world, works in conjunctions with these heavy metals is conclusive. These findings point to causation of many of the neurological diseases that are increasing in this country like Alzheimer’s, ALS, Parkinson, Autism, Schizophrenia, and others. (http://foodintegritynow.org/2014/09/30/dr-stephanie-seneff-glyphosate-roundup-autism-connection/) 

Dr. Seneff has been studying autism and the environmental causes since 1975. She predicts by 2032 at least 50 percent of the population of children will be autistic due to glyphosate related exposure to their nervous systems.

And our nervous systems are not the only part of our bodies paying the price.  These days it seems that every other person you know is gluten intolerant.  According to Seneff, it’s not the gluten, it’s the glyphosate that has been sprayed on grain crops before, during and after for over half a century—–now systemically injected or coated on the seed.  All of our corn, oats, barley, wheat, and soybeans are industrially farmed these days with massive amounts of chemicals, causing generations of health problems due to inflammation and irritation of the digestive system. Glyphosate is pervasive in our food system—over 75% of the food on our grocery shelves are filled with them (http://civileats.com/category/gmos/).

Seneff’s work is groundbreaking not only because of the longevity of her research, but because she has been able to show the synergistic effects of glyphosate on the whole biological systems where they are sprayed.  In the globally used herbicide, RoundUp, she focuses upon more than just the organic chemistry breakdown.  She demonstrates the effects on the whole biotic community over time. It is not as benign as we think.  She calls RoundUp, “the elephant in the room”.

Over half a century ago, Rachel Carson, a wildlife and sea biologist exposed the effects of DDT in her epic, groundbreaking book, Silent Spring.  At that time DDT was used as ubiquitously as glyphosate  It had become lodged in every system—from waterways to food, to air to mother’s breast milk. Song birds were disappearing. Today, glyphosate in RoundUp, which chemists, sellers and city officials alike will tell you is perfectly harmless—– don’t worry, it breaks down rapidly into a substance as simple as table salt—– is also found in our soils and water, our food systems and bodies. Perhaps it breaks down in the environment eventually, but not before it binds to heavy metals and carries them to us and every living thing.  We are awash in neurotoxins from a chemical shield that is sprayed around us.  Only now are we beginning to know the long term effects, thanks to Dr. Seneff.

Most GMO or companies in the chemical industry will offer their own research on the effects of GMO’s.  After 3 months, their particular window of time, they find that GMO products are “safe” for animals and consumers.  Seneff said that in her research, it takes more than 3 months for long term effects to show up such as cancers and disruptions to major systems, including endocrine and digestive.  It is the same issue that Carson faced—-the jury is out on the long term effects in the environment, humans and animals.  Since Seneff has been looking at RoundUp and glyphosate related effects for over 40 years, she has a long baseline from which to speak. (http://wn.com/the_new_food_order_how_glyphosate,_herbicides_&_gmo%E2%80%99s_are_shaping_our_future)=

Sorry to be the bearer of unhappy news, friends of bees and living things.  I urge you to ban RoundUp and every insecticide or pesticide in your backyard and use natural means.  Spread the word. Vinegar spray with dishsoap and water, or chili powder are among the ways to dissuade those pests (http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/homemade-organic-pest-control-spray-organic-gardening-189076).  There are also biological enemies for every pest out there e.g. ladybugs, praying mantis’, lacewings.

And those weedy weeds?  Leave them until after they flower and then use some elbow grease or hire a teenager to pull them out, if you must be rid of them.  Plant some habitat that bees will love. They will be grateful, especially as forage becomes slim pickings in the Fall season.

No more scorched earth. Please.