Page 10
News
Street Roots • April 14-20, 2017
Easy backyard beekeeping
Forget honeybees, you can be a backyard beekeeper
with m inim al .effort when you host native bees
BY EMILY GREEN
apple or other fruit trees. It’s also quite
gentle compared to the honeybee, Golden
ackyard beekeeping is big in Portland, said.
While honeybees live in large colonies
but it’s also increasing in popularity
that need to be managed, a single female
worldwide, said
mason bee will take
bee educator Rebekah
care of all her own
Golden.
Get a permit
young.
She teaches classes
Bee Thinking
on how to be a
You can visit Portland Urban
builds several
backyard beekeeper at
Beekeepers’ website to learn
alternative models of
Bee Thinking, a locally
more about the permitting process at
backyard hives for
owned beekeeping
portlandurbanbeekeepers.org.
honeybees, made
supply store and
j
Take
a
class
j
f
.....
from sustainably
education center in
sourced wood grown
Southeast Portland.
Bee
Thinking
offers
beginner
in the Pacific
But she didn’t
beekeeping
classes
for
$30.
Northwest. For those
always like bees. Her
typically
held
from
6
to
9
p.m
who want to keep
entire life, Golden
Wednesdays and Saturdays.
honeybees, starter
said, she was “quite
kits range upward
fearful” of the little
from $99 without the
pollinators. She
hive, and $349 with a
originally studied
hive.
ecology and
But for about $20
evolutionary biology at
to $30, they also offer
the University of
mason bee houses
Arizona with the
you can stock with
intent of studying
paper tubing for bees
chimps in Africa.
It was when she
to nest in. These
worked as a research
small houses look
assistant in a
more like birdhouses
bumblebee pollination
than beehives and
lab that she
require very little
maintenance.
discovered bees were far more docile and
unique than she had ever imagined.
Mason bee houses can hang from a
“I fell in love with them,” she said.
building or in a tree, and should be about 6
feet off the ground. You can also purchase
“There are 4,000 native bee species to
North America. Most of them are not social
cocoons and place them in the paper tubing
where they will nest.
and don’t produce honey like honeybees do
- honeybees were actually introduced from
Bees will emerge from the tubes and
Europe in the 1600s,” she said. “Most of
pollinate your garden; then it’s hands off
our pollination is done by our native bees,
until October, Golden said.
and they are actually better at pollinating
The bees will hibernate in the winter, so
than honeybees. The way we use our
in the fall, remove the cocoons from the
honeybees as commercial pollinators is
tubing, get rid of any that have parasites
actually a misuse of their skills.”
or disease, and then stick them in a
The mason bee will pollinate 95 out of
refrigerator for safe keeping until the
every 100 blossoms it visits, making it very
spring.
popular with gardeners who have cherry,
Bumblebees and many of Oregon’s
S T A F F W R IT E R
B
FINDING HOME, from page 7
weed. I knew something about addiction,
because I knew about alcoholism. I was
against it. I didn’t know, though, about
cocaine.”
And now he had all that money. “It
sucked me in completely, smoking crack.
Your mind and your body loved it. It made
the relationship so powerful, the intimacy. I
didn’t realize that the drug was part of it
and that it wasn’t real. I stopped doing my
job the way I had been. I had done my job in
order, methodically. I was real and sincere.”
But now that he was smoking crack,
Joseph starting taking shortcuts, and was
always in a hurry to get back to his
girlfriend. He quit his job, because he was
too ashamed to stay. He had always been
proud of his work, but could not do it well as
an addict, and the embarrassment was too
much.
That addiction lasted for more than 20
years, and led to chronic homelessness and
eventually heroin. Though Joseph did not
have a place of his own, he rarely slept
outside. “Wouldn’t ever stay anywhere for
more than a week. You lose friends if you
stay too long. I wanted them to feel good
about me.”
But he did not want to hang out
downtown: “I have pride.” About addiction
he said, “I was lost and confused. Addiction
is hiding from everything, blocking
everything out, whatever it is, it gets you out
of reality.”
Rebekah Golden is an educator at Bee Thinking, a beekeeping supply store in Southeast
Portland. She said many o f Oregon’s native bees are docile, solitary pollinators that prefer
native plants.
other native ground-nesting bees require
even less maintenance.
One of Oregon’s native ground-nesting
bees, the mining bee, is so docile that
children at Sabin Elementary in Northeast
Portland call it the “tickle bee,” and made it
their school mascot. Thousands of mining
bees make their home at the school, and
they earned their nickname because they
“tickle” when they touch the students’ skin.
To accommodate ground nesters, simply
leave a bare patch of loosely packed earth
that gets some south or southeastern
morning sunlight, Golden said. The trick is
to simply leave it alone throughout the year.
“You’ll see people who have planter boxes
with perfectly manicured and mowed lawns,
and it’s really organized and aesthetically
pleasing,” Golden said. “Or you could have
something that looks just a little more
chaotic, and is lived in.”
In addition to leaving some bare patches
of ground, she recommends planting
perennial grasses, which have extensive root
systems that make good homes for ground
nesting bees. Allowing some weeds to grow
will give pollinators a pollen and nectar
source when many other flowers aren’t
in bloom.
lb
She also recommends
avoiding pesticides,
especially neonicotinoids.
“There are a lot of
different neonicotinoids, and it’s under
dozens of names in products you can
purchase off any garden store shelf. A lot of
people know neonicotinoids are bad, and
don’t want to spray them, but then don’t
realize that that’s what they are using,”
Golden said.
“Even some natural pesticides are going
to have problems,” she said. “They mostly
come from really concentrated plant
compounds, but those plants were evolving
for thousands of years to combat herbivores,
so it’s still very toxic, even though it’s
natural.”
Throughout evolution, as plants up their
toxicity, insects evolve a resistance.
“It’s kind of this arms race between the
two,” Golden said. “Whereas pollinators
have spent thousands of years in a
mutualistic relationship with plants, so they
don’t have a lot of the same pathways that
develop resistances to pesticides or to other
plant compounds, so a lot of times they are
more susceptible to those toxins than other
insects are.”
While you will not need a permit from the
city to keep mason or ground-nesting bees,
you will if you want to have a honeybee hive.
You will also be required to notify your
neighbors, have a visual barrier and meet a
number of other requirements. If you rent,
you will need written permission from your
landlord.
Joseph shoplifted during those years, got
caught and went to jail. Eventually he was
caught with cocaine and ended up in prison,
at Columbia River Correctional Institute.
“The first successful help I got was at CODA
(a treatment and recovery program in
Portland). I only went because I could get
out of jail. I want to give credit to the United
States Mission here in Portland, too. That
program really helped me.
“Every time I went to jail, I returned to
God. You get a chance to look at yourself
and your mind starts to clear out. I started
connecting with some of the church that I
had learned as a kid. We went to Sunday
school - it gave me a foundation. I don’t call
myself a Mormon, but I am a Christian.
“When I first went to jail in 1996,
Marion County Jail had services every night
of the week and I was the only guy who
went to all of them. I read the Bible from
cover to cover.”
Joseph’s life story is complicated, with
many ups and downs. But now, he has been
clean and sober for 18 months, and is in a
methadone program. And after waiting for
nine months and with the help of Northwest
Pilot Project, he is living in his own
apartment. He is very clear about the three
keys to finding his way out of homelessness:
treatment, spirituality and the help you get
from others.
You can t do it alone!” Joseph pounds on
his knee for emphasis. “I wouldn’t be able to
be clean now if I hadn’t opened my eyes
spiritually and opened up to treatm ent.”