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The vanishing bee count at my local park, 5 months of watching
I started counting pollinators on the same 100 foot wildflower strip last June, just jotting numbers on my phone during lunch. The first week I hit 40 plus bees easy, but by September I was seeing maybe 8 on a good day. Last month I walked it again and there were barely 3, and the flowers looked fine, which honestly creeped me out more. Has anyone else done a simple count like this and watched the drop happen in real time?
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wesleyb202mo ago
Is one season of counting really enough to call it a collapse though, especially with how weird last summer's heat was for everything? Seems like a stretch to blame the soil when you didn't sample any of it, you know?
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kelly3852mo ago
The "flowers looked fine" part is what gets me. People always blame pesticides or weather, but nobody talks about the soil itself. Wildflowers can look totally healthy above ground while the soil biology underneath is dead, and that means the nectar chemistry actually changes. I read about this study where stressed roots make nectar less sweet or more bitter, and bees will straight up skip flowers that look perfect but taste wrong to them. You might be watching the flowers lie to you basically.
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