On a recent trip to a grocery store in Randolph, I noticed a sign stating the area had been sprayed for pest control. The sprayed area was about 1,000 square feet of a sandy bank that was home to a colony of gregarious (but solitary) ground-dwelling bees.

Before the spraying on May 29, I had seen many hundreds of burrows and activity was extremely high. I visited on June 4 and saw absolutely no signs of bee activity. I presumed they had been poisoned.

We have a very uneasy relationship with insects, especially stinging insects. The ground bees I saw are not aggressive and will sting only if handled. These bees occupied a little strip of land away from the main customer parking lot. Someone must have complained to the management, who called the “pest” control company to deal with it. Only the area with bee nests had signs.

So what is my point? We need to re-evaluate our relationship with living things, including insects. They have a right to live and reproduce, too. If we need to interact with them it should be with informed action, not ignorance. To that end I offer this quote from the Cornell University Department of Entomology web page.

“Usually, spraying water over the area of the nest is enough to encourage the bees to look for a different nesting area. However, due to their beneficial role as pollinators and their lack of aggressive behavior, please consider maintaining these important bee pollinators in your backyard.”

For many informative links about wild pollinators simply Google “wild pollinator web resources.”

Adam Tomash

West Gardiner

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