On February 23, I arose early, got into my car and headed to the Amtrak station in St. Paul to go by train to La Crosse, Wisconsin, embarking four hours late and ambling along past wintry scenes on the Mississippi that we don’t see from a car, all for the purpose of attending a day-long lecture on Managing Your Insect Allies, presented by MOSES, the Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service.
One of the sponsors of the presentation was the Xerces Society, a non profit organization whose mission is to protect wildlife “through the conservation of invertebrates and their habitat.” It is a quality organization with high profile names like E.O. Wilson, Thomas Eisner, Paul Erlich and Marla Spivak appearing on its list of science advisors, counsellors and directors. The Society was named after the Xerces blue, a butterfly whose habitat was in the San Francisco area before it became extinct in about 1943. If you’re interested in the Xerces Society, check out its website at www.xerces.org.
My attendance at the MOSES presentation was an unforeseen consequence of our having put some Evening Star acreage into prairie grasses and wildflowers as part of the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program (WHIP), a federal program expanded by Congress in 2008 to aid populations of native bees and butterflies that are in decline. Much land, formerly rich in pollen and nectar, has been converted to shopping centers, golf courses and fields of corn and soybeans (from the bee’s point of view, a useless and sterile environment). Without realizing it, we had become engaged in a righteous cause, and are now guardians of the land. I went to La Crosse to learn something useful.
The presenter, Eric Mader, an enthusiastic and knowledgeable young man, held everyone’s attention while he told of the variety of native bees and other beneficial insects, their great importance to humanity and the sad decline in their populations. To my mind, one of his most interesting revelations was the strange prediction in 1937 made by Dr. Edith Marion Patch, who I have found by on-line research to have been an extraordinary person. She was born in 1876 and studied english at the University of Minnesota winning prizes for her sonnets. She received a doctorate in entomology at Cornell. She was told repeatedly there were no jobs in entomology for a woman; nevertheless, she was invited by the University of Maine to organize a department of entomology. Despite protests that a woman could not succeed in this job, within a year she had established the department and earned a salaried position. In 1930 she was elected the first woman president of the Entomological Society of America. A colleague told her the reason she was not elected earlier was “The fact that you are not a man.” Using her considerable talents as a writer and teacher, Dr. Patch has written more than 100 children’s stories or articles that teach about insects in charming prose.
Dr. Patch was convinced of the enormous and irreplaceable importance of insects to humans. Some forty years before the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, Dr. Patch warned against the indiscriminate use of pesticides. She predicted in 1937 that some time in the future, “Entomologists will be as much or more concerned with the conservation and preservation of beneficial insect life as they are now with the destruction of injurious insects”, and that by the year 2000,
...the President of the United States would issue a proclamation claiming that land areas at regular intervals throughout the U. S. would be maintained as ‘Insect Gardens’ under the direction of government entomologists. These would be planted with milkweed, hawthorn, and other plants that could sustain populations of butterflies and bees.
It is 2011; no president has made such a proclamation, yet Congress recognized the importance of insects in the 2008 farm bill which, one should add, became law only after President Bush’s veto was overriden. While not precisely on the money, in its general direction Dr. Patch’s prediction was prescient. Perhaps she was too optimistic about the state of U.S. politics.
The photo you see is the site of the Evening Star Apiary, which has been readied to open for business upon the hiving of four packages of bees which will likely arrive in early May. In order to keep the black bear and skunk out of the area, we have an electric fence powered by the solar panel you see in the center of the area, which delivers about 5000 to 7000 volts, enough hopefully to discourage would-be invaders. With the forests, the prairie and all the flowers we intend to plant, the bees should have ample supplies of nectar and pollen by June or so. In the meantime, we will feed them sugar water and pollen patties. By mid-summer we should have honey, but this year, some or all of it will have to remain with the hives so the bees can survive the winter. If all goes well, in future years we should have a surplus.
The New Years Eve weekend at the Evening Star was accompanied by some really weird weather. An all day rain on top of the 12 or so inches of snow was on the menu for New Years Eve day, turning to glare ice as the temperatures dropped during the night. Fortunately, we were snug as bugs in front of the fire. 
