Why Are There No Insects in My Backyard?
Last night, I took a glass of wine and a book into the garden on a beautiful evening in Toronto, thinking I’d stay outside until the mosquitoes got bad.
There weren’t any, and I stayed out until sunset.
I repeat: No mosquitoes in Toronto in mid-July. I’ve been noticing all spring that there aren’t many insects on the flowers in our garden, which is usually buzzing. Sometimes the hum is so loud the hum it’s noticeable above urban noise.
I’m not alone, surely. What about your garden?
Usually I see a few mason bees. Three or four have set up housekeeping on the eaves in our garage dripping trails of wax down the clapboard, and welcome to them.
There are no honey bees. By which I mean—there are no honey bees in my backyard. None. There haven’t been any all spring and summer.
None of those nasty little red bugs called red lily beetles, either. They’ve been eating my lilies for the past four or five years. I don’t use pesticides. I’ve picked them off individually and crushed them to try to save the lilies. Every year so far they’ve won. Lilies 0. Bugs 1.
There’s only one lily left in the garden, but this year it’s blooming ecstatically. Because, I repeat, there aren’t any beetles. Lilies 1. Bugs 0.
No wasps. We had a family barbecue in the backyard on July 1 and there were no wasps. No wasps at a barbecue?
A few cabbage butterflies flutter around, that lovely white ghostliness. I’ve seen a couple of red admirals. A few bluebottle and greenbottle flies. Ants, of course. If we drive everything else to extinction there will be ants, rats, pigeons and us.
The garden is beautiful. Without pests, the plants are vigorous, taller than usual and putting out an abundance of flowers—which remain largely unpollinated, their stamens heavy with orange grains. This year the purple cone flowers are purple and bright orange. The orange catches your eye as much as the purple petals.
A friend said a couple of weeks ago, “Aren’t the flowers lovely this year? Do you think they’re trying to console us for what’s going on in the world? Or if this is the end?”
It’s happening with birds, too. On Monday night I talked to another friend whose father leads his students in an annual bird banding project near Toronto. He told my friend, For the past two years there have been almost no birds. Almost none.
Climate change sounds huge and abstract, even as the seasons change and temperatures rise. Individuals mourn that environmental problems are bigger than all of us. And bee colony collapse disorder is the beekeepers’ issue. (Isn’t it?) I mean, what are you going to do when part of the problem is industrialization paving over honey flowers? And the rest of the problem is pesticides marketed by the likes of Monsanto, which doesn’t give a shit and does so litigiously.
Obviously, other people have had their lives changed more dramatically and for longer than we have in Toronto. The well-documented global rise in temperatures is especially disastrous in the Arctic and in Africa, which contribute little to global warming. In Africa they have powerful droughts, famine and a radical increase in the number of refugees, and bless people trying to find better lives. Wildfires in drought-stricken B.C. and California are burning down peoples’ houses. More tornadoes. Worse hurricanes. Ask any neglected Puerto Rican.
Now it’s here in my backyard in sheltered Toronto, where the temperature this year reached 44 degrees Celsius on the humidex, 111.2 Fahrenheit, on our July 1 barbecue weekend. In Toronto, Canada?
Eerie how beautiful the flowers are. Maybe the plants are trying to console themselves. Because we aren’t doing nearly damn enough to help them.