I think the farmers killed all our bees and we’re probably next.
Tldr: The farm I pretty much live in is spraying a ton of pesticides now that they have to actually sell their potatoes rather than get gov funding for letting them rot every year and now every single bee in the area is fucking gone.
So, I live in a potato field that sometimes rotates to some kind of grain and is rarely left fallow. By in, I mean I can walk 20 feet and stand in their potatoes on two sides of the property. Since moving here in 2021, they have very rarely sprayed these crops with anything. Maybe once a year at the most. Along with this lack of spraying, literally every year before this year, they also dumped dozens of massive dump truck loads of rotten potatoes out behind these fields in a stinking, rotting mass. Very few trucks to ZERO trucks ever left this area to bring potatoes out to be processed, only to a single storage barn and then later dumped in the rotten pile. This is a stark contrast to the many other farms up here where you can set your clock by the number of trucks full of potatoes going in and out of town. You can literally find your way all the way down to the factories by following the potatoes lost along the side of the road.
When I looked into their records, I found that they got money from the government every year for crop losses. A LOT of money. And they’d filed every single year for many years now. Like clockwork. Plant. Spray once. Grow. Harvest. Clean. Store. Spring time massive rotten potato dump. Bring in more seed potatoes. Plant. Start over again.
Only, this year is the first year that government program was cut by you know who. So no more money for mountains of rotten potatoes. They have to actually sell them now. So this year, they have sprayed the fields 30+ times. Now, I’ll remind you of that number from earlier. Maybe 20 feet away from where I live. In a drafty shitty house with the wind coming off those fields. Which. Ok. Probably gonna get a horrific cancer if I don’t already have one going, and so are my cats. And yes, I can request a list of wtf they’re spraying and yes they do technically have to comply. (But will they?) And yes, a number of farms up here have already been caught in previous years spraying SUPER banned chemicals on their veggies. And yes, half of those very same SUPER banned chemicals are now unbanned or no longer something you can sue over getting cancer from because of the same you know who.
But now the bees are gone. ALL of the bees.
When we came back up here in the spring, there were our usual hundreds of bees. All different kinds. Up until last month there were still some bees. There’s a usual rotation for the different flower seasons, but there are ALWAYS bees on the clover and daisies and the mess of little purple ground cover flowers that I don’t know the name of. There are always bees here.
But today I spent over an hour looking through all the flowers in our yard and wild flower field and didn’t see a single bee. And I realized I hadn’t really noted any since early June at the latest. (And I’m constantly on the look out for the rusty bee, so I’m almost always looking at bees) I thought maybe the flower rotation was a little slow this year so maybe I just missed them and they’re off in the clover. No. None on the queen anns lace. None on the daisies. No bees anywhere.
There are no bees here anymore.
