We have two cherry trees in our back yard. One produces sweet cherries. The other produces much smaller and tart fruit. I know very little about fruit trees, but we have enjoyed the abundant harvest of the sweet cherry tree. Last year we filled our freezer with cherries and we still have a few left. One of the treats of this spring has been the cherry pies that Susan has made for special dinners. The frozen cherries make wonderful pie filling. The sweet cherry tree is the first of the two to blossom. The tiny white flowers fell to the ground and the leaves emerged before the other tree was fully covered with blossoms. This means that we get an extended time of having at least one flowering tree in our back yard.

I enjoy having fruit grown in our own yard to eat but there are many other benefits to the trees. One benefit that I didn’t envision before we moved here is the joy of springtime for our grandchildren. Last week when our grandchildren were over for a visit, I looked out the kitchen window to see our nine year old granddaughter dancing in the falling blossoms. Later she lay on the grass beneath the tree and allowed the white blossoms to fall on her. She came in from the yard with several blossoms clinging to her hair. She and her sister made tiny bouquets of blossoms that they took home to their mother. The trees provide a background for first class entertainment for me and there is no admission fee.

One of the things I enjoy about the blossoming trees is standing under them on a sunny day. The air above me literally hums with all of the bees that come to the tree in search of nectar. As a byproduct of their visits, pollen clings to their legs when they land and when the bees travel between the two trees, the pollination that is necessary for fruit production occurs. We have several different kinds of bees that visit our yard and I can identify some of them. As one who tends domestic honey bees, I recognize that some of the bees that visit our yard have come from domestic hives. They aren’t from my colonies, which are a couple of miles away at our son’s farm. I’m not sure where their home hives are located, but I’m happy to have them in my yard.

There is emerging evidence that suburban and urban homes are providing essential habitat for bees. The expanding monocultures of modern farming combined with extensive use of pesticides has resulted in a nearly catastrophic decline in the health of bees in some parts of the country. Honey bees that are transported as part of a focus on agricultural production are especially vulnerable to what has been called “colony collapse.” Truckloads of bee hives are driven across many states as the bees that pollinate almond trees in California are, in many cases, the same bees that pollinate alfalfa fields in Washington later in the summer.

Small scale keepers of colonies, like our tiny apiary with only four hives, provide a vastly different life for the bees that live in them. Our bees live through the cycle of the seasons, staying inside the hive living off of stores of honey in the winter and emerging to forage for nectar and pollen only when temperatures are above 50 degrees or so. Honey bees navigate by light and sight and are inactive in the dark of night.

Honeybees are only a small fraction of the bees that work to pollinate plants. Worldwide there are an estimated 20,000 distinct species of bees. Only a small fraction of those bees live in hives built by human hands. 70 percent of all bees are ground-dwelling, meaning that they lay eggs and tend larvae and pupae in holes in the ground as opposed to other locations. They are dependent upon patches of bare soil where they can access and dig in dirt. Of the 30 percent of bees that dwell in hollow stems or dead trees only tiny portion live in human made habitats.

People have been studying bees and learning about their lifecycles for hundreds of years. When people understood very little about bees, they began to seek the sweet honey that the bees store. Often harvesting honey involved destroying a colony of bees. Modern apiary practices come from generations of beekeepers who observed the bees, discovered and measured the amount of space they need to form their combs for brood and honey and construct hives to house the creatures. Most commercial bees are kept in Langstroth hives with perfect even spacing between frames holding the combs, which in modern hives are only partially formed of wax provided by the bees. The frames already have the honeycomb pattern in a plastic backing for the bees to use to create space for the brood. A minority of bee keepers use hives with only bars at the top of the boxes from which the bees form their comb. Those top bar hives also are based on carefully measured spaces to allow bees to form comb and navigate the distance between the combs to care for the developing new bees. There has to be enough space for the queen to move between the combs to lay the eggs.

Most bees, however, continue to thrive without human intervention in their cycles of reproduction. They are not dependent upon shelters provided by humans. Scott Black, executive director of the nonprofit Xerces Society advises people to become “lazy gardeners” in order to provide habitat for bees and other pollinating insects. Mow less, leave the stems of plants after they have dried out, allow sticks that fall from trees to remain on the ground, don’t pick up all of the fallen leaves. Not every square inch of your yard needs to be either paved or producing plants. A bit of bare earth will provide habitat for ground nesting bees. They will dig in on their own or move into abandoned dens left by small rodents and other animals.

Learning more about the creatures with whom we share this planet is one of the joys of this phase of my life. I feel honored to have a tiny bit of responsibility for just a few bees while I recognize that the health of our planet requires that we learn to live with the insects that surround us and help our food to grow.