A man and his bees

Loren Muth knows bees aren’t pets. He doesn’t go around trying to pet the bees that lurk on the flowers in his yard or mourn their deaths each and every year. And with 1,000 of the little things buzzing around his yard, he certainly doesn’t know all their names. But if they’re not quite pets, the insects Muth calls his “little guys” are also far from strangers.

Muth owns their homes and helps ensure they have enough food. In return, the bees do their own share of work and keep his ever-growing garden, well, continually growing.

“They’re like little independent winged cats,” Muth said. “They do their own thing. I’m here to make sure they’ve got a nice place to live and if they want to come around me then they can.”

A dozen years ago, as he sought to bring life back to his home’s mostly vacant yard, Muth bought his first mason bee “house” from an online listing.

Today, those bees—or, rather, their descendants—help Muth grow a range of vegetables and fruits, and keep his grocery bills down. They’ve also helped bring a dose of nature back to his Chilliwack neighbourhood, while being seemingly perfect, unstinging yardmates.

‘A natural progression’

Muth’s home in the Garrison area of Chilliwack has been in his family for decades. Growing up, he hated the yard, and especially having to mow its lawn. But as he took over the property in his 20s—and as he started studying agrology and learning from UFV professor Tom Baumann—Muth began to see its vast potential.

He started simple, with a relatively small two-bed garden. He planted asparagus, onions, tomatoes, garlic and potatoes.

“It was a natural kind of progression,” Muth told The Current. “I'm kind of cheap and I don't want to have to buy all my food in the grocery store.”

Today Muth is a professional agrologist, and also a Ch’íyáqtel (Tzeachten) First Nation councillor and the manager of the band’s environmental portfolio—and its greenhouse, which produces food and produce for members.

But when he first started upgrading his yard, he was just a young person looking to turn a useless yard into something more productive. Being an agrology student, Muth decided he could use some bees. So he looked on Craigslist, found a mason bee house for sale in Coquitlam, and bought it. Mason bee houses come in all shapes and sizes, but generally they’re a simple structure that can be filled with narrow horizontal tubes in which bees can breed and live.

Muth started with 20 tubes. Now he usually has between 2,500 to 5,000 tubes in any given year and at least 750 to 1,000 bees on site at any one time.

That’s a lot of bees for a quarter-acre of land. But Muth says they have become terrific companions.

“To me they’re almost like little pets I care for, even though I recognize they’re not pets,” he said.

So what’s it like sharing a home with 4,000 bees? Muth spoke at length about gardening and living alongside thousands of tiny companions.

Gentle-mannered guys

Muth: “These guys are super docile. I've actually never been stung once in the 12 years that I've been dealing with them. Reportedly, they can sting. I think a lot of people, that's what scares them off.

“When they think ‘bee,’ they think ‘That's going to sting me, it's going to hurt me, it's going to do all this bad stuff, it's going to go to my house or whatever.’ But these little guys, like, they have one purpose [which] is to go and pollinate to reproduce. They have a very short window of life. So March, sometimes February, depending on the year… until June, sometimes July. Then they're done.

“They kind of keep to themselves. They have their tasks, that's go get food, go get mud or clay, go get water, and make sure that their offspring have what they need. They don't cause any problems—or aren't hive forming. They're not swarming bees or anything like that. I think most people just hearing ‘bees’ would be a little apprehensive. But once they actually see what I might be referring to, the nerves completely go away, because you can stand directly in front of the nesting blocks or the hive and they'll just go around you.

“They'll land on you once in a while, but they look more like a fly than a bee a lot of the time, and people often will kill them thinking that they're a fly. Overall, they're very docile. They're gentle-mannered.”

“The biggest thing when you get these little guys is just thinking, ‘Hey, do I have food in my yard? And am I using pesticides anywhere?’

FVC: Do they bug you while you’re eating?

Muth: “No, they’re not interested at all. Honey bees may. But these little guys won’t come around. They don’t care about people food. They don’t want sugar in the same way other bees do or wasps. They’re looking for one thing and that’s pollen.”

Muth’s yard now features a large garden, fruit trees, and a bunch of bees. But it has a couple other things: wildflowers, wild plants and, sometimes, yard waste. The pollen from those flowers serve as a prime food source for the bees that then pollinate Muth’s garden. And with more and more plants in his yard, Muth has found his property starting to teem with nature.

Muth: “As I started upgrading or changing the dead barren yard space [and planting] diverse flowers, but also food, every spring I would notice different bees hanging around different plants —they weren't just honeybees, they weren't just mason bees.

“And that really got interesting for me because then it was almost every single year, you'd be able to go out and say, ‘Okay, which ones are here now, which ones am I seeing?”

“Growing up … most people will see a reduction in the amount of biodiversity around their houses from the time they were a child to now because of development and things like that. But with the increase in flowers, food, fruiting trees, green plants, things like that, I've seen an explosion of biodiversity in my yard.

“I really do try to keep things fairly natural, I don't do major yard cleanup in fall—I wait till kind of mid-spring and then I started cleaning up just to give time for you know, bugs and critters to come out of hiding.”

“My property is a little bit wild, I guess some people would say it's unkempt. I think of it as more natural. I don't let it get out of whack, but in the research and reading that I've done a lot of the time it benefits to let things be more natural.

“If you want to look at anywhere from Vancouver to Langley, a lot of the time, people have their lawns, three flowering shrubs, and that's kind of it. And it's essentially a barren wasteland of land that's built for people, but has no room for wildlife. That's where I think we see the major decline and in populations of insects, deforestation obviously plays a huge role, loss of habitat, things like that. I'm a firm believer that nature will find a way and whether or not we're around in 100 years, animals and insects and whatever else is around will end up thriving in our absence.”

Muth will be speaking more about mason bees in a free talk at Minter Gardens Saturday at 10am. You can find details here.