As I took a drive on Easter Sunday around the county, I started to notice certain areas that already had violets and daffodils blooming as well as grass that was much greener than in Swan Lake. And with the summerlike weather we have had this week it seems everything is greening up real fast. To that end I wanted to bring up a topic I first reported about last April, a national movement called “No Mow May”. 

I heard this story on the Weather Channel and, as a beekeeper, was fascinated. By not mowing our lawns in the month of May, or April if it stays this warm, we can increase honeybee populations by 500% in 2 years. 

Now here is the rest of the story. At Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, two assistant professors, Dr. Isreal Del Toro and Dr. Relena Ribbons started a study of bee populations in the Appleton area after they convinced the Appleton Common Council to endorse the “No Mow May” concept, a practice that first appeared in Great Britain and has shown great success. The University began working with the Appleton Common Council, and, in 2020, Appleton became the first city in the United States to adopt “No Mow May”, with 435 homes registering to take part. Dr. Del Toro and Dr. Ribbons studied the impacts of No Mow May on Appleton’s bees. They found that No Mow May lawns had five times the number of bees and three times the bee species than did mowed lawns and town parks. Appleton was the lone city at the start of the project in 2020, but by 2021 it had officially spread to seventeen townships in Wisconsin as well as four other states. In 2022, the list spread from Bangor, Maine to Billings, Montana as the results of repopulating natural bee populations have been remarkable. Rochester, New York signed on to the project last year as the first city in New York State to do so. 

The concept is so simple, keep your lawnmower in the garage for an extra month so that the natural early season weeds and wildflowers can come up and bloom providing needed early season pollen for some of the hardest working insects in the world. By providing an abundance of pollen early in the season, bee populations are able to expand much faster and produce queens that will inturn go out and form new colonies during the late spring and early summer. 

Up here in the North this is important for bees to do as early as possible so that new colonies can store enough honey to last them through their first winter. If a new colony doesn’t have enough time before winter sets in, they will simply starve during the winter. So early season flowers like dandelions, white clover, bugleweed and chickweed though unsightly, provide a valuable service in the circle of life. Ask any beekeeper in Sullivan County and they will tell you that bee populations here have been under stress for some time now. This is an easy way to help get them back on their feet. So let the weeds grow for a month, there will still be plenty of time to kill the weeds in June when the bees can focus their attention on all the other beautiful flowers that you plant or the garden in the backyard. Not to mention all the wonderful trees and shrubs that will be blooming throughout the summer. 

After I wrote about this last spring, I talked to many beekeepers that said they saw more bees during the summer. I caught three separate swarms last summer at the store simply by not mowing our store lawn until Memorial Day Weekend. Sometimes by not doing something so small, that we have been told to do our entire lives, like mowing the lawn, we can have a huge impact on the entire ecosystem. Pollinators are crucial to the overall health of the planet and, if we can help them out by not mowing for one month, unsightly weeds are small price to pay for a healthy bee population. 

You can research more on this topic at www.byobeez.org where the project all got started in Appleton, Wisconsin. And who knows, instead of selling you weed killer in the future, I could bee selling you a beehive...