A patch of arugula is in full bloom. The wild bees are buzzing all afternoon, finding plenty of food to gather as they buzz from flower to flower. Luckily for me, this means I will have plenty of arugula seeds to keep planting through the summer. The great thing about many vegetables is that you don’t have to keep buying seed. Let some of the plants flower and go to seed and you have a supply of vegetable seeds in perpetuity.

That’s assuming that the wild bees will keep coming. There’s no guarantee that they will. They can’t reproduce and survive if their habitat, our gardens and our fields, are continually doused with poisons. When I visit garden and hardware stores and see aisles of poisons and herbicides, I wonder how much longer our fragile environment will last. It’s a sobering to think that one of these springs, the buzzing of bees may be gone.

Honeybees abandoning hives and dying due to insecticide use, research finds
Beyond Honeybees: Now Wild Bees and Butterflies May Be in Trouble
Decline of bees forces China’s apple farmers to pollinate by hand
Declining Bee Populations Pose
A Threat to Global Agriculture
Bee Sustainable