For ten years my husband and I have been counting pollinators. Around mid-February we print off our identification sheets, grab our binoculars and set out into the forest around our house and start counting.
In the ten years since we moved out here—from our hometown since the air pollution was too much for our youngest daughter’s asthmatic lungs—we have of course noticed a decline in pollinator populations, particularly bees. There are many reasons for their disappearance. I’m sure you can make some educated guesses as to what they are.
We do not discriminate against flies, beetles, wasps, the rare hummingbird, these days. We count them all. The butterflies disappeared two years ago. We sent in our data sheets and were asked by the coordinators if we had forgotten to include them.
No, I wrote back. There were none.
They confirmed that this was the case in several other areas. I did not tell Ellis. He looks forward to the count each spring, which comes earlier and earlier, and this year he wanted Sophie and Dora to join. Lately, when bad climate news finds us, he wants to be alone. Goes for long walks, sometimes bringing our pup tent and staying out for a few days, alarming the girls and leaving me a single parent.
Honestly, I don’t mind that much. I knew when we first met that the dramatic changes in the weather bothered him, made him feel helpless. And I know now that sometimes that feeling can be too much to bear. So, I tell the girls daddy’s on vacation and we make pancakes for dinner and build a fire in the backyard, make smores, and invent new songs to share with him when he comes back.
This year, we started the count March 1st. The snow was already gone and the temperature was a balmy fifteen degrees. Ellis had driven the thirty kilometres into what constitutes a town to get the girls some new rain boots and their own clipboard to share. Then, early the next day we took them out of online classes and wandered through the thigh–high grass waiting and watching for our personal sign of spring.
That day started well enough. Sophie saw a hoverfly about an hour into the count. It was floating near early clover, its long striped body bright against the still–yellow grass.
“I can’t see it,” moaned Dora. I lifted her up to get a better view.
When she was finally able to see it, she gasped.
“It looks like a bee though.”
“Kind of, yeah,” said Ellis. “It looks like that to make predators think it has a stinger, but it doesn’t. It’s a trick.”
We came in for lunch after seeing nothing else. Dora played hover fly all afternoon, pretending she was poisonous to anyone that touched her. I could see as Ellis made a salad that he was delighted by the girls’ enthusiasm. They went back to classes for the afternoon and we did chores, his watchful eyes on the fields of slowly blooming dandelions and buttercups. After dinner, we went out again in the twilight, when the bugs are more active.
Again, Sophie was the first to spot something.
“What is it?” she asked, pointing to the hovering creature near the treeline that marked the end of our property.
Ellis got out his binoculars.
“Oh my god, it’s a ruby throated hummingbird,” he said.
He passed the binoculars to the girls, then to me. The hummingbird was still there, calm as anything, dipping and weaving through the field.
“We haven’t seen one in a while. Good spotting sweetie,” he said, hugging Sophie tight.
We went back in shortly after. Once the girls were in bed, Ellis and I had a glass of wine to celebrate the first day of the count, as we usually did.
“I think it’ll be a good year,” said Ellis. “And it should be a good year for the raspberries. We can make jam.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” I said.
“The girls need to know what wild fruit tastes like,” he said, downing his glass and pouring himself another one.
. . .
The next few days we saw one or two flies and spotting some non-pollinating beetles, but Ellis remained optimistic. The temperature had plummeted back below zero as it sometimes still does in March.
“Most are probably still hibernating,” he told the girls and proceeded to explain why we never raked up the leaves from our small copse of trees at the back of the property. “Bees will sleep under the leaves all winter. They’re good for keeping them warm.”
We continued to go out every morning and every evening. The hummingbird never came back, but a few other spring standards came by for a visit. For a brief period between the end of March and early April, our outings turned into birdwatching, which I didn’t mind. I was, however, growing concerned about how few pollinators we had seen.
The third week of April, I emailed the count coordinators. I asked if anyone else had reported low numbers. They responded a few days later saying yes, the counts were down, but it might be because of the cold weather, which, in broad terms, was a good thing. They said not to worry.
But by the end of April, it was hard not to. We still went out every day with the girls, and still barely saw any signs of pollinators. I went over to the Kellers and the Lamberts, who reported the same. Not only had they seen few pollinators generally, but Idina Lambert, a champion gardener, had not seen a single bee.
“Not one?” I said, feeling suddenly dizzy, as if the ground wobbled beneath me.
“Not a single flippin’ one,” she said.
I wasn’t sure if I should say anything to Ellis when I got back. He’d been scouring the Internet, reading forums and posts from local naturalist groups, and reading the local news to see if anyone was talking about it. A few comments at the end of stories, that was all.
The girls were getting bored of going out and seeing nothing. The birds were no longer exciting. Ellis and I started going out by ourselves.
“No bees,” said Ellis after an evening count of just five hover flies and twelve beetles.
I emailed the coordinators again. No response. But on the first of May I woke up to Ellis, body tense next to mine, reading an email on his phone and cursing under his breath.
The count had been suspended. A collapse in the bee population. The coordinators would be doing field research to find any small pockets of the population left. With farmers panicking about possible massive losses to their crops, priorities needed to be set.
“You know what this means right?” said Ellis while I was still reading the email. I nodded.
. . .
Countless articles poured out over the next few days, the Prime Minister called for calm and assured the population something would be done, with no specifics of course, and then on the same day brought forward to a bill to open up deep sea mining exploration in the Arctic Ocean.
I don’t think Ellis slept for three days. He tried to hide his grief from the girls. But they knew something was wrong immediately. Then, abruptly, he left early one morning, before I had woken up.
“Is it because the bees are gone?” Dora asked me as I made dinner.
“We don’t know they’re all gone,” I said, trying to sound reassuring.
My sweet girl shook her head, as if embarrassed by my naiveté. She looked serious. Concerned. It broke my heart. It is not that I didn’t understand Ellis. I had just been through it all before, and I’d known this was coming for far longer than him. It was happening to a lot of our friends. Men who, for so long, were able to bury their emotions about the climate crisis were suddenly forced to see what had been in front of them for decades. There were suicides. Others spread their anger around. Even my sweet, kind—hearted husband realized too late that by insulating himself from the ongoing catastrophe, he’d made the inevitable all the more difficult to take.
. . .
I kept going out for the count, cajoling the girls to join when I had the energy, waiting for Ellis to return to us. But he didn’t. After four days I started to worry. He was usually out for two days at most. I didn’t know if he had any food. When the girls asked me when he was coming back I didn’t know what to say.
On the morning of the fifth day, I didn’t take the girls out.
“But why not? we might still see one!” said Sophie, tears filling her eyes.
“We have to find a way to help daddy, Soph. Let’s focus on that for a bit okay?” I said, having slept poorly, thinking as I drank my coffee that its days might soon be over too if pollinators were declining around the world.
Sophie started to cry, then refused to join her virtual class. Dora quickly followed suit. I let it slide. Instead we sat on the couch together, the girls reading while I surreptitiously texted our neighbours and friends asking if Ellis had stopped by, or if they’d seen him out in the woods.
“Mommy, can you pollinate flowers by hand?” asked Dora.
“I don’t know,” I said, surprised by the sudden change in her voice from insolence to curiosity. “Should we look it up?”
“Yeah,” she said.
Sophie closed her book. “We should look up how to pollinate raspberries. That’s what daddy wants.”
So, we looked around, the girls suggesting search terms and reading slowly, carefully, all the information we could find on pollinating raspberries.
It turns out raspberries are a lot harder to grow than I thought. Every single little ruby nodule (called drupelets, as the girls enjoyed saying over and over again) that makes up the berry has to be pollinated.
“What’s a pistil?” asked Dora at one point as we were reading a gardening article about self–pollination. I had no idea. We searched for that, then went through the entire anatomy of plants.
We got into all of it. By the time we’d exhausted everything besides academic articles, it was dark out. I left the girls giggling about fruits and babies to get dinner ready, when I heard the front door open. It was Ellis. Crusty bearded and smelling like days old sweat.
“I heard you guys laughing from outside. What were you doing?”
“Talking about raspberries,” I replied.
“Ah.”
He came over and wrapped his arms around me as I started washing vegetables. I almost gagged at the smell. He let me go and looked out the window into the front yard. The crocuses were already out, and I could see a few tulip shoots, souvenirs from the city we used to live in.
“The girls want to try pollinating the raspberry plants by hand, if it’s possible,” I said.
“Oh?” said Ellis. But I couldn’t tell if he was paying attention.
“I’m going to make dinner. Go shower then come join us, okay?”
I was just finishing up the lentil stew when I heard the footsteps come down the stairs. He was clean shaven and smiling. Like he’d never left. The girls went over and hugged him tight. I wondered for a moment, how it felt to leave and return all the time, if Ellis ever felt he was pulling at the threads of our family each time he left. He didn’t want to be this way; of that I was sure. He didn’t want the world to be the way it was either. But to my mind, you can’t change either one on your own, much as you may try.
Ellis asked Sophie questions about her social sciences class, Dora interrupting to tell him all what she’d learned about raspberries that day. Ellis listened like it was the only thing that mattered.
“I think I know how we can try and pollinate the raspberries,” said Ellis as we sipped on whiskey we only brought out on special occasions. The girls were playing some game on the TV behind us.
“We can try tomorrow. I’ll go into town and get some things.”
. . .
Ellis was gone when I woke up. Panic filled my body until I looked out the window and saw the car was gone too.
He was back before the girls got up. And he was the one who woke them and made them breakfast.
It started to rain in the afternoon, but Ellis took the girls out of classes anyway. We all put on our rain jackets and boots and tramped outside in the mud and bright green grass.
“Okay, here is how we’re going to get some raspberries.”
Ellis pulled out four electric toothbrushes.
“Watch carefully.”
He turned one on and then bent in front of a raspberry flower.
“Petals form the outer layer of the flower. Then we have the stamen and anthers, covered in pollen,” he said. We all leaned in closer.
“At the very centre are the pistils. You girls were right, a raspberry can pollinate itself, but to form a full fruit, every pistil has to be pollinated.”
With slow deliberation, Ellis pressed the whirring toothbrush bristles against the yellow anthers. A brief shower of pollen fell into the centre of the flower, covering the pistils nestled inside. He did this over and over again, until each anther had released pollen onto the pistils. Then he got up and handed a toothbrush to each of us.
“This is just my first idea. I’m sure one of you could think of something better. But I thought we could try this, see how it goes.”
From them on all we did was pollinate raspberries. In the morning, I’d download the girls’ homework for the day. Then we’d spend an hour pollinating, before coming in for breakfast and one school activity. Then three hours of pollinating before lunch, then on and on, rotating between pollination and homework until it was dinner time. I started seeing little pink and white flowers in my dreams.
When he wasn’t pollinating with us, Ellis was calling all our neighbours, asking if they had seen any bees. He started to call our MP and MPP, demanding to know why they hadn’t foreseen this and what they intended to do.
He also called other members of the count. They shared information on what they’d seen and what was still missing. More than once I heard Ellis offer low–voiced sympathy to a fellow counter who had not yet seen a bee.
But then, others had claimed to see some.
“A few honeybees apparently have survived a few hours north,” said Ellis one night in bed.
“I might go talk to the beekeeper there, find out what they know, see if they’ve seen any solitary bees.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” I said.
I was thrilled to have Ellis back, but wary of opportunities for failure. I did not want to lose him again if it turned out that bees were forever a critically endangered species. I was scared that my need for him to stay would become too obvious or the task of hand–pollinating the raspberries would become too overwhelming and he would retreat again.
I felt both selfish and cautiously relieved when each day proved me wrong. After a month with the electric toothbrushes, Ellis decided we should try other things and share our results with the people he’d talked to from the count.
We tried paintbrushes, bits of sandpaper, small dusters, mini fans, we tried using our hands and we tried scraps of fur from rabbits or deer that Idina Lambert had provided us when I told her about our experiment.
“Let me know what works,” she said as I made to leave. “I’ve got blueberry bushes. I’d like to make a pie this summer.”
It was painful work. The girls had less difficulty, but our backs ached from hours hunched over and we made liberal use of painkillers for the headaches we got from craning our necks to find flowers. After pollinating, Ellis would write down what worked and what didn’t in a shared spreadsheet with other counters and our neighbours. Soon others were collecting data as well and passing on tips for how to create shelter for bees that were still out there.
“We’ll have to stop pollinating for a while,” said Ellis one morning. It was mid-May and the temperatures that week were expected to soar past forty degrees.
The girls were outside watering the raspberries with a hose attached to the back of the house. It had been a dry spring. Forecasts warned that June would bring more drought and potentially brown outs, along with water shortages in our area.
Ellis called them in and hugged them close.
“We did our best. Now we have to wait and hope our little friends can finish the job. We should open the basement windows, in case there are any pollinators looking for a cool place to wait out the heat.”
We all stayed low to the ground that day. At eleven we went down to the basement ourselves, its dirt floor cool on our feet. Ellis and I placed some towels on the ground and told the girls to pretend we were at the beach.
The hours went by slowly. Sophie read next to Ellis, Dora dozed, and I watched the air fill with dust particles and heat as light breezes wafted in and out of the small basement windows.
Then I saw it. A small body drifting through the window, its fuzzy yellow legs a dead giveaway.
I said nothing, afraid any noise would send it flying back out into the deadly heat. It came to land on a wooden table with some flowerpots on it, relics of the previous owners we hadn’t bothered to get rid of. The bee crawled into an overturned pot. I got up, aware of every part of my body. Ellis looked up at me. I put my finger to my lips, and he nodded.
I went up the stairs as quietly as I could, hoping the bee wouldn’t be disturbed, but aware that it might’ve come to die in a cool, quiet place. As soon as I was up the stairs I ran outside, almost choking on the heat and grabbed some small rocks from the side of the house. I put them in a small bowl, filled the bowl with water, then hastily went back to the basement door.
By this time both girls were sitting up and watched closely as I came down the stairs. I placed the bowl on the table as quietly as I could and came back to join them.
It took about ten minutes before the bee peered out of the pot and hopped onto the edge of the bowl.
“What kind?” whispered Ellis, transfixed.
“Leafcutter.”
“Can I get closer?” said Sophie, already inching off her towel.
“No don’t, you’ll scare it,” said Dora.
We waited and watched until the bee had covered itself in a thin film of water and went back into the flowerpot. It was still so hot. My t-shirt was sweat through. I went upstairs once again and grabbed four shallow buckets full of water. We all put our feet in the buckets and that’s how we all fell asleep; half sitting against the wall, four sets of feet in buckets, sticky and exhausted.
When I woke up, Dora was at the flowerpot, poking a finger inside. My neck was sore from sleeping upright. I got up and she turned and came back towards me.
“It’s gone.”
“Maybe it’s out getting some food. Pollinating some raspberries,” I said, trying to feign a smile as I rubbed my neck and took stock of the soreness I’d incurred during the night.
“I hope so,” said Dora. “It’s nice to have some help.”
“Yes. It is, isn’t it?”
Ellis and Sophie were still asleep, curled into each other. I looked to one of the windows. It was cloudy out. Maybe we would get some rain after all.
“Should we go see if our bee has any pals?”
“Yeah!”
We went upstairs, got a clipboard, some binoculars, and stepped outside to see what we could find in the field.
Emma Bider is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology. Emma is from Ottawa and loves speculative fiction, cli-fi, sci-fi.
