I do not have any idea where the strange idea came from that farm crops in the mid west used to have flowering plants useful to honey bees but since the wide use of pesticides that is no longer the case.  The truth is long before pesticides were available farmers used to work very hard tilling the ground to control weeds.  Of course all that tilling was also ruinous to soil structure and created a marvelous hard pan which limited both water and root penetration.  The net result was an awful lot of top soil that went down the Mississippi compared to modern practices which are vastly better at preserving soil.

When I was a kid in Iowa growing up on a farm I remember once seeing three or four common milkweed plants 30 feet from the fence row in one of our corn fields.  This was about 1950 or 52 way before herbicides were used on farms.  I could take you back to the spot those milk weeds were growing today I remember it so clearly.  Why do I remember it?  Because there were never any milk weeds in our corn fields.  Or any other broad leaf plants.  Some grasses here and there was all you found.  Our bean fields were the same.  We also grew oats as a cover crop for alfalfa seedlings and there were no weeds of any type in the oats.  Alfalfa fields were generally run for hay two years then plowed under and turned back into corn.  One of my jobs was to mow the hay so I saw a lot of acres of alfalfa up close.  There were nearly no weeds in the hay fields I mowed.

The actual truth is there are spring broad leaf weeds in corn and bean fields in the mid west today that simply did not exist before the world was drenched in pesticides.  Back in the good old days when farmers were busy wrecking soil to control weeds they got out there early in the spring and killed them fast.  Today the first herbicide application may well not be until early June giving those bee friendly weeds two months to grow and produce nectar in the spring.  The bees have more forage in farm fields in spring today than back in those good old chemical free days.

One major change has happened that has harmed bees and other pollinators in the mid west.  Back when I was a kid the government did not come around mowing ditches all summer.  So, ditches were full of milk weed for Monarchs and flowering things for honey bees and other pollinators.  Today the ditches are groomed to near golf course standards in many places.  You can hardly find a pot plant growing in Iowa ditches these days.  When I was a kid it was all over the place in ditches.  If bee keepers want to bitch about lost habitat in the mid west perhaps they should bitch at the party that is doing the real damage.  The government.

I sure wish people that damn pesticides would get an education on the reality of those good old days versus today so they had some minor clue what the truth is.  I do not expect that to happen.

Dick


" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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