Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [93]
Bumblebee queens have been out of hibernation for at least two or three weeks, and by now they would have found nest sites and would be starting their annual colonies. All the flowers that are concentrated here should be a magnet for them. But today, like the last time I was here, I hear and see almost none. Even after slogging all around the bog until my feet are numb from the cold, I again see none of the many species expected. I see only one Bombus vagans and one B. ternarius, the latter a pretty black, yellow, and orange bee. Has something happened to the bees?
One species, Bombus terricola, which used to be the most common one from my clearing in the woods to the tops of the nearby mountains, into this bog, and into the woods in the northern Maine wilderness, seems to be totally gone. I have not seen it for years, and I am again shocked not to see it today. I have seen few bees of any kind, however, and I am not yet worried, because bumblebee populations, like populations of other social insects, such as wasps and hornets, keep growing throughout the season. Each queen will produce hundreds of workers as the summer progresses. By July the population will appear to have dramatically increased, since the queens who before then spent most of their time hidden inside nests where they incubated their eggs and larvae have produced crowds of workers and drones. Thus, late summer is the best time to see which species are locally present. Bombus terricola was still present, though very rare. During two years’ search I ended up seeing three workers in Maine and one in Vermont.
On this day in May the bog looked pristine and nothing seemed changed except for the apparently total absence of a species that hardly anyone would have looked for, or noticed. What happened?
SOME YEARS AGO I FOUND ABOUT A DOZEN MOUNDS OF Styrofoam chips mixed with peat buried in the bog to grow something above the water level. I think they were the remains of potting soil for marijuana plants that someone had grown in the most hidden spot he or she could find. The foreign plants had long since been removed, but I was appalled to see a substance in this natural ecosystem that did not belong here. I spent half a day digging it up; hauling it out through the woods and up to the road; trucking it away; and paying to leave it at a dump, even though I was trespassing myself in the bog (since I had no idea who owned it). This time the bog was apparently no longer being used as a dump for piles of Styrofoam (mixed with soil), but on my walk I had passed a real dump site on the side of the hill toward the bog, and I was again shocked, angry, and—more than anything else—also afraid. This dump site contained an unsightly collection of plastic, other discarded petroleum products, dozens of tires, and other detritus. Could poisons be released from any of these products of our chemically synthesized civilization to bio-accumulate and disrupt the metabolism of an ecosystem?
Any foreign chemical put into the ecosystem, whether the woods, a swamp, or the body, is by definition guilty until proved innocent. And innocence is difficult to prove, since effects may be slow, may be long delayed, and may pop up in the least expected places. I am talking about natural versus unnatural compounds, although I do not mean that natural compounds are nontoxic. On the contrary, some of the most