By Pauline Lloyd
Well last month there was an article in Vegan News about butterflies. And this month I decided to follow on with an article all about bees. Many vegans deliberately avoid purchasing any goods that contain bee products, because like most farmed animals, bees are manipulated in various ways throughout the honey-production process.
Some of the ways in which bees can be harmed include:
Bee products include: honey, honeycomb, wax, royal jelly, bee pollen, bee venom and propolis.
Candles
Polish
Cosmetics
The following vegan companies offer a good selection of vegan bee-free cosmetics by mail order:
Dental Floss
Some companies (e.g. Oral B) produce an unwaxed version.
Bees As Pollinators - Their Importance In The Veganic Garden
The bumble bee (Bombus sp.) and the honey bee (Apis mellifera) are excellent pollinators and are very useful insects to have in the veganic garden. Pollen, picked up from one flower, clings to the bee's hairy body and is then lost in small quantities when the bee visits other flowers, gathering further pollen and nectar. These busy little creatures thus ensure that crops, fruit trees and flowers are pollinated and are of such importance that farmers and growers sometimes deliberately rent colonies of bees in order to pollinate their crops and orchards. Almonds, pear, apple, cherry and plum trees all rely on bees to pollinate them.
Bee Plants
There are many plants which are very attractive to bees. In fact many plants go to a lot of trouble to make themselves highly attractive to bees and other pollinators, often developing special adaptations especially for this purpose. Scent, bright colours and the production of nectar are all adaptations which have been developed to encourage pollinating insects to visit the plant's flowers. The insects are thus supplied with food and in return the plants are pollinated, ensuring that their fruits and seeds set and allowing them to reproduce successfully.
The following plants are all good bee plants and those in pink are especially good for bumblebees. Note: Ones marked with a * will, in addition, be visited by many kinds of butterflies.
Many herbs are extremely attractive to bees: lemon balm, basil, *thyme, *lavender, *hyssop, mint, chives, *oregano (Origanum vulgare) and bergamot are particularly popular bee plants. Other plants that are very attractive to bees include: *greater knapweed, *lady's smock, foxglove, *bird's-foot trefoil, blackberry, *dandelion, St John's wort, many species of thistles, *buddleia, teasel, clover, sunflower, phacelia, lupin, poached-egg flower (Limnanthus douglasii) and yarrow.
So, if you want to grow fruit trees/fruit bushes in your garden - or if you simply want to increase the yield from your veganic vegetable plot, then it is well worth planting some of the bee plants listed above in your garden. And you don't necessarily need to plant them in a separate area of the garden either - many of these plants can be interplanted amongst your vegetable crops. Poached-egg plant, for example, makes a lovely edging plant for fruit or vegetable beds and sunflowers grow well amongst a bed of sweetcorn. (See June 1997 issue for more information.)
Honey bees and bumblebees are social bees, living in colonies which consist of a queen, a few drones (males) and many worker (infertile female) bees. The queen's main function is to mate and lay eggs, but she also produces a pheromone which inhibits the worker bees' reproductive glands and prevents further queens from being formed in the hive. As far as is known at the moment, the drones only exist to mate with the queen! Whereas the workers, as their name suggests, do most of the work in the hive. They clean and defend the hive, feed the larvae, make the comb and when they are about 20 days old, go out gathering pollen, nectar and propolis. In addition some of the workers are scout bees, seeking out new sources of pollen and when they find a new source of pollen, on returning to the hive, they pass on the information to the other bees in the hive by doing a special dance, 'the honey dance'. This dance is performed in the dark hive and conveys to the other bees the precise location of the new food source. (Note: It's thought that sound may play a part in this communication too.) If the food source is located close to the hive, then the dance is circular, but if it is more than a 100 yards away, the dance becomes a figure of eight. A honey bee colony can exist for up to 20 years, although individual worker bees in the colony have a short life span of about 30-35 days. Under wild conditions, without human interference, queen bees are thought to live for five years.
Bumblebees do not live as long as the honey bees. The worker bees live for only one summer and the colony dies off in the autumn. In late summer new queens and males are produced and after mating the young, mated queens hibernate for the winter, coming out of hibernation in early spring to establish new colonies. At this time, you will often see them flying round, close to the ground, looking for new nesting sites. Bumblebees often nest in desserted bird or mouse nests in the ground.
A recent report in The New Scientist (13th March 1999) pointed out that all is not well with the bumblebee. Changes in farming practice are threatening its survival. Bumblebees need large areas of flowers throughout the summer, in order to feed and nest, but many of our former meadows have been ploughed up, or are now being used to graze sheep and cattle instead. And it is this loss of meadow that is believed to be largely responsible for the decline in the bumblebee's numbers. One species of bumblebee may already be extinct, with a further nine species close to extinction or threatened. It is, therefore, vital that plants such as red clover (Trifolium pratense) and bird's-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) are available in order to ensure the bumblebee's survival. Why not help by growing some in your garden? Red clover is a valuable, nitrogen-fixing, green manure crop and is thus well worth growing in the veganic garden. You can purchase seeds from the John Chambers' Wild Seed catalogue (they can be sown in both spring and autumn) and seeds of bird's-foot trefoil are also available from John Chambers. As well as being an important nectar source for the bumblebee, bird's foot trefoil is a useful butterfly nectar plant and will provide food for the caterpillars of the Common Blue, Scarce Blue and the Dingy Skipper. This low-growing plant has a spreading habit and is useful when grown in a mini-meadow.
Bee-Related Websites:
Bees 'Spread Genes from GM Crops'
It was reported in 'The Times' recently (p.10, 15th April 1999) that the Government is to review the guidelines on the isolation of genetically modified crops because a recent study has revealed that bees can carry pollen four kilometres from test sites. At present, trials to access the environmental impacts of genetically modified crops use 'buffer zones' between the crops and the countryside of just 50 metres - a distance which is obviously inadequate. Results from studies on oilseed rape plants suggest that farm-to-farm spread of oilseed rape transgenes by cross pollination will be widespread. Researcher, Dr John Crawford, from Keele University said " bees carry a lot of pollen concentrated on their bodies. So the amount of pollen getting to a plant could be quite significant".
Further Reading:
Copyright © Pauline Lloyd 1999