Pax Vobiscum

 

Heifer Ranch is a working ranch and agricultural demonstration farm at Perryville, Arkansas. This year I witnessed at the ranch how honey bees play a role in restoring and enhancing the environment for both plants and animals. Managed honey bees along with feral colonies and native bees and pollinators play a quiet and barely seen role in the life of the ranch. For instance, bees pollinate legumes, including clover, vetch, lespedeza, alfalfa, partridge peas, and beggar’s lice, as they gather nectar and pollen to feed their colony. Pollination is the first step in the production of seed for these plants growing in pastures. Legumes provide high-value, nitrogen-rich food for livestock and wildlife animals, and legumes are but one family of flowering plants and grasses that feed livestock on the ranch. The livestock, selectively bred to thrive on grasses rather than grain feeds, are managed for sale for human consumption.

As well as producing seed by pollinating plants, bees benefit the environment by enriching the soil. Bacteria dwelling on the roots of legumes convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form suitable for use by plants. Thus, they enrich the soil and promote the growth of pasture grasses and increase the carrying capacity of the land. Regenerative agricultural practices employ measures replicating the natural grazing of wildlife that allows grasses to develop deep roots. Heifer Ranch cattle and sheep, shown here rotating to another of the ranch’s pastures of tall grasses, graze the way bison move across the Great Plains, constantly moving to forage available grasses. The cattle and sheep eat the top growth of the grasses and deposit manure that fertilizes the pastures. Their hooves push nutrients into the soil; the soil improves; grasses develop deeper roots; and the soil retains more water than soil under shallow roots. The honey bee queen ends her short winter break and starts laying eggs on the winter solstice to regenerate the colony. The Underhill family of Peace Bee Farm offer to all: Peace be with you.

--Richard