However, there are benefits. Not only has it become a low-maintenance affair, it has become a haven for wildlife. At its best, a garden is not only a place of quietude and beauty, it provides a sanctuary for birds, reptiles, butterflies and bees. Bulbuls, doves and magpie robins have given my patch of greenery their personal imprimatur by setting up home in its verdant branches; butterflies and moths lay their eggs under its foliage; banded bull-frogs and skinks hide in the flower pots, Asian bees hang their fragile, pendulous nests from the roof of my neglected sala.
Of these neighbours, bees are the focus of today’s peregrinations. Referring to the earthworm, the evolutionist Charles Darwin declared: "It may be doubted if there are any other animals which have played such an important part in the history of the world"; had the great man sought a small creature of equivalent importance above ground, he would have surely chosen the bee. The world desperately needs bees. And the world is not looking after them.
In my garden I have two colonies of apis florae. One of the smallest of the honey bee tribe, the red dwarf honey bee is native to these parts and may well be one of the most ancient members of the family. Sadly, it is particularly at risk for a variety of reasons. Its small exposed nests or combs are very visible in leafless trees and they cannot be defended in the same way as nests built underground. One knock sends them crashing to the ground. Moreover, the bees’ small size means that its double sting is largely ineffectual against predators.
Of these, man is inevitably the chief scourge, especially here in Thailand, where villagers scour the rainforest for this delectable source of honey. I would urge everyone who lives here and who respects Mother Nature to avoid buying these honey combs which are frequently hawked around bars in plastic buckets; instead buy bottled honey which may have been diluted with syrup but at least comes from commercial hives. The bees in my garden have another problem. Because they sometimes need to take on water when nectar is scarce, they often end up in my pool. Defenceless, they are quickly dispatched by pond skaters.
I have declared war on pond skaters.
Considering bees in a less parochial light, it is worth making a few general observations about this remarkable insect. While apis florae is the Asian species, most of us are familiar with the western honey bee (apis mellifera), a much larger variety domesticated everywhere for honey production. It has its own set of problems, including climate change, habitat loss, nicotine-based pesticides, varroa mites and a mysterious condition called colony collapse which may be related to some or all of these factors, and which caused, in 2015, the collapse of 42% of bee colonies in the United States.
It does not always help being a social creature, but for the bee, togetherness is everything… And especially so for the queen. A new colony comes into existence when a virgin queen seeks out and mates with numerous males or drones from another colony. It used to be thought that the drones pursued the queen heavenwards in a dance of death until only one remained to complete the act of mating; this romantic notion has been largely discredited. But one part of the narrative remains true to the facts ; the drone does die after mating.
For the fertilised queen, her creative role is just beginning. The new star is now followed by a huge contingent of faithful worker bees – a swarm ‒ to a nest site chosen by the workers beforehand. They start to create a new comb from beeswax, and raise a new colony from the eggs laid by the queen. The resulting larvae – one to each hexagonal cell ‒ are initially fed on royal jelly. In colder climes, honey bees can survive the winter by congregating at the centre of the hive or nest and consuming the stored honey.
The importance of the bee as a pollinator cannot be exaggerated. While many plants – including all cereals – are wind-pollinated and need no insectivorous assistance, some fruits such as apples are entirely dependent on a process whereby the bee transports pollen from male anthers to another flower where the sticky stuff attaches itself to the female part, or stigma. Statistics are elusive, but it is estimated that crop production worldwide might drop by 20% without the agency of bees and other pollinators. The bee is not aware that it is performing this vital service; it is primarily concerned with collecting pollen and nectar as food for the growing inmates of the colony.
The process of collecting pollen is a laborious one. While a near miraculous sign system known as ‘waggle dancing’ is employed by bees in the hive to convey information about the location of nectar and pollen-bearing plants, its collection involves a gruelling amount of flying. A colony of honey bees (apis mellifera) may fly 55,000 miles (more than 88,500km) to make one pound of honey. And incidentally, that honey is the only insect food that we can store and eat.
Special? You betcha…
Patrick Campbell’s book ‘The Tropic Gardener’, described in one Bangkok review as the best book on Thai gardening for 50 years, is available for B500 (half price) to personal callers from 59/84 Soi Saiyuan 13 in Rawai (Tel: 076-613227 or 085-7827551).