Dead Bee, No Snow

Bees in February.  We had them in January, too.

I woke up hoping to find a landscape blanketed in snow. Not a huge dumper, but just an inch or two, but some. Over a year and a half of drought makes an inch or two matter incredibly; cover the grass, stop the evaporation loss of the soil, rebuilt the moisture level with a steady drip from melt. Please. The storm came from the west, over the mountains, not pushing up against it, so it was hard to expect much. Hopefully the mountain snow pack has been been pulled up from these near record lows. 

Yesterday I came hope from walking the dog to find a bee frozen and starved to death, clinging to the screen on the porch. It had landed there sometime during the day while it had been out in a fruitless search for nectar and pollen. he trees keep trying to provide some only to have another minor frost come in and kill the buds. Everything should just be asleep, not waking up, exhausting itself, the returning briefly to a troubled and soon to be interrupted torpor. We were finding bees in January. The food supply of the hives must be in terrible shape; instead of sleeping, conserving through a long winter and awakening to a verdant spring the bees awaken in 50, 60 degree temperatures and head out looking for food. The food isn't there, and the hives lose their workers in the next snap of cold, their reserves of honey and food drawn down to replace workers and feed sorties into a barren landscape. 

This is the future coming. I remember the Rocky Mountains as a child. There always seemed to be a mist about them. Last summer we didn't go camping because of the fires; from my office in Boulder I watched one spring from nothing to hundreds of acres in the span of a brief walk. Had we been in a park with one exit could we have escaped? I rather think not.


It's looking like the start of another very hot, very dry year. I just hope the fires aren't as bad.





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