Linda, love your posts. Great little story and I always enjoy them. Glad you didn't see any dead bees today.
MikeG. Your comments about pesticides were very interesting. And, you would not likely get roasted on this forum for comments. That is good.
When I was at our bee club meeting the end of last month we had a speaker that came from the Ministry of Land and Agriculture who gave some very interesting speech about the use of pesticides on food crops.
The advancement in pesticides being much more friendly to human, insect population, etc. is incredible. Farmers are becoming much more knowledgable too about the need to protect the pollinators' lives. If we didn't have pollinators, we would be in trouble in the food area, for sure. If we allow pests to destroy crops, we will no have food. Pesticides are integral to this world in which we live, (be them natural or chemical, shall we call it), we would not have as much food if these "armies" were not in place.
I do not use pesticides on my food crops, but I am a small time hobby farmer. I have the luxury of not having so much to grow that I cannot take the time to rid my plants of pests.
One pest that I am hand picking now is the asparagus beetle. Every year I hand pick off as much as I can, there are two species here and they are annoying. But I pick them off, crush them between my fingers and the ants have a hay day. I have learned to trick these little buggers. They see you when you want to "get" them, so they either fly away or move to the other side of the fern. So, I knock the stem sideways a bit and they drop into my hand and then I do the crush, yeah!!!! Killed another one. So far (I have been counting, I have killed about 100). I have harvested now over 200 spears, the window is soon closing for picking, the spears are coming up pencil thin mostly and that is nature's sign to stop. The big, fat spears are not very prevalent now. Too bad that it doesn't go on for months. Oh well, about 20 meals have gone into the freezer for wintertime. Yeah!!!
Ooops, I think that I got off topic. Have a wonderful day, great life and love the life you're livin'. Cindi