Summer
Bees, bats and beautiful smells

“I hate bees,” a boy from down the street tells us one sunny afternoon.  “They sting you.” 

We are standing in our garden, examining the hundreds and hundreds of buzzing insects which are enjoying our flowers.  There are honeybees, bumblebees, hoverflies, orchard mason bees.  Some of the bees we see are green. Some are bluish and so tiny, they look no bigger than ants.  Some fly in lazy, drunken loops, searching for nectar as they spread the pollen from plant to plant.

All spring and summer, the headlines about bees have been alarming and discouraging.  Some mysterious thing -- a disease? a disorder? a chemical disaster?  no one knows yet --  is causing honeybees to leave their hives and never return.  Beekeepers are in a panic, and farmers are feeling the pain as the price of beekeeping services has skyrocketed.

But meanwhile, my yard is full of all kinds of apiarian activity.  Almost every plant is a buzz.  I take pride in this highly localized small-scale success:  in addition to planting for butterflies and birds, I garden for the bees. 
Most native bees are solitary, docile and rarely if ever sting.  In North America there are thousands of species which fly around gathering nectar and spreading pollen.  By some reports, more than 90 percent of the pollination which occurs in rural and suburban settings is the work of native insects including bees.  And recent research has shown that the native bees increase the productivity of honeybees; it seems that the presence of the native bees makes the honeybees wiggle a bit more, work a bit more, pollinate a bit better. 

The bees I like best are actually the little miniature ones, which are only slightly bigger than gnats. Using a magnifying lens, you can see them work frantically at the flower tops, searching for the sweet liquid hidden inside.  Sometimes you can also see them dig around in the dirt as they begin the process of laying their eggs. 

To encourage all the bees in our yard, I leave patches of bare ground under some of my shrubs undisturbed.  I never use sprays which would harm these important insects and I tend a mostly organic garden.  I leave hollow tubes in a special Orchard Mason Bee box, and hang leftover hollow canes from last year’s Joe Pye weed and raspberries for the ones which like to set up housekeeping in such spaces. 

“I hate the bees,” the boy says to us again.

“I like them,” I say after some thought.  “They are busy, though.  We should stay out of their way and let them do their work.”

He grunts.  “What kinda work?” 

“Well, they make fruit, they make trees, they make food.  They are very important to all of us,”  I say. 

“Bees will sting you,” he says, sticking to his side of things. 

“Some of them will,” I concede with a smile.  “But I like them anyway.” 

My daughter and I are at the pool, swimming together in the deep end.  It is the early evening on one of those incredibly humid days, when the air hangs like a thick summer blanket all around us.  My daughter has her arms clasped around my neck:  she is trying to learn to swim and we circle around, enjoying the feel of cold water enveloping us. 

“Oh Mommy, something smells good,” she says. 

I know what it is she is smelling.  I know the seductive qualities of that plant all too well, its dangerous habits, its aggressive behaviors.  Yes, I know all about its charms. 

“Honeysuckle,” I tell her, as we circle around and around, dodging the antics of other swimmers. 

That smell snaps my mind backward like a rubber band and I am once again a child, running through Aunt Susy’s yard in North Carolina, toward the grape arbor.  My older cousins, John and James are hanging upside down from its top rails, searching for grapes hidden among the curtains of yellow and white.  “You can drink the drops off it,” someone says, and we all begin to pick the flowers and pull out their middle strings to find the glistening drops of nectar waiting inside so we lick them clean.  Then someone begins throwing rotten grapes, and the smells of the two sweet plants mingle in my mind, imprinted forever. 

“I like that smell,” my daughter says, snapping me back to the present. 
As we continue to swim and hug against each other, I reflect on the power of the honeysuckle’s scent: able to overcome the pollution of the nearby beltway, able to overcome the chlorine in the water where were are floating, able to overcome the smoke from someone’s poolside barbeque.  It grows rampantly in the mysterious, forgotten urban woodland that lines the path outside our pool’s grounds. 

I wonder about the trees which are covered in its strangling grip of those vines.  How much longer with they survive before the Japanese honeysuckle kills them? 

I am about to say this to the three year old in my arms, and then catch myself just in time.  There will be time for that, later.  For now we circle and sniff the air quietly, in love with summer and swimming.

We have been watching for the bats.  In the past I have seen them circle and swoop in the dozens, eating bugs and occasionally squealing as they come just inches from our heads while we catch fireflies. 

But something seems wrong this year.  Some nights I don’t even see one bat in our backyard.  Some nights there is just one aviator up there, looking lonely to my human eyes.  I have the ridiculous urge to talk to her, find out how her family is doing, make sure everyone she knows is okay.  Perhaps the other bats just have found better food elsewhere.  For the first time in a long time our backyard is not completely overrun with mosquitoes.  Maybe they are just down the street eating someone else’s bugs.

I check the trees for owls, too.  We saw an owl back in early spring, out on a rare daytime jaunt.  It landed in one of our evergreens and upset the songbirds to no end, before finally flying off to a better hiding place.  I keep checking that tree with a flashlight, hoping to see owl eyes glare back at me.  But so far, all I see are branches. 

I wonder about the bats and the owls.  Sometimes, if you aren’t used to seeing a particular form of wildlife, it is easy to think they are startled to find us here in the backyard, as startled as we are to see them, as if they awakened like Rip Van Winkles out of a sleepy wilderness to find us here overtaking everything. 

But if you stop to think about it, the individual animals have never known anything other than this, either: city lights, beltway noise, polluted water, lots of cars.  This is an old suburb.  Perhaps they have the good fortune of not knowing how stressed the ecosystem really is.  Perhaps it is only we humans who write that story by studying, observing, making records of the changes over time, pondering what is was like before built everything up and up and up.  We lament.  They simply go on trying to survive. 

I return back to the patio, where the bats are usually numerous and peer upwards to the turquoise sky again.  Venus is up, and the moon hangs like a sideways smile.  The lone bat circles and circles silently as I turn off the porch light and go into bed.

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