The Secret Life of Melons

By Holly Wren Spaulding
Sun contributor
Working outside and tending our gardens many of us have noticed that the bees are active of late, in some cases aggressively defending their food sources and nesting areas. Bee and wasp killer is on display at the hardware store and for some among us, stings mean allergic swelling and emergency measures. But I cringe to think that the bees are regarded as a hazard and hassle of the season — that they are perceived as pests and treated to chemicals no matter what they are up to.

Domesticated around 7000 years ago, bees have long lived in collaboration with humans, providing us with sweet honey and pollinating our flowering food crops both in the wild and in our cultivated plots.
Pollination is the process by which an animal — usually a wild bee, though domestic honey bees, wasps, moths, butterflies, flies, beetles and other invertebrates can also do this job — carries pollen from one flower to another while gathering nectar. This pollen fertilizes the flower, thus ensuring that a fruit is eventually born.
Back in June a few of us transplanted melon seedlings into a 300-foot row on the farm where I work. We tucked them gently into little holes on top of heat reflecting black fabric, anticipating a variety of melons in by summer’s end. In late July the plants were flowering and it was time to remove the canopy of “remay” agricultural cloth, which protects the young plants from cooler temperatures and especially from pests.
Flowers, by definition, are pretty and sweet smelling — they need to get noticed by the roving bees and their appearance has evolved to function as a form of flirtation. When a melon blossom opens it has about eight hours to attract the affections of a bee. When the sun comes up, bees head out in search of nectar, making trips back and forth to the hive where they deposit what they have collected for the youngsters in the nursery. If a pollinator isn’t around to find those open blossoms, nothing will become of that particular effort at fruiting. When the temperatures cool at the end of day, blooms close and bees head home for the night. You can see why it is important to uncover the melons as soon as the flowers appear and why it is important that our pollinators be offered safe passage when they are doing what they do.
This week the first of the melons, a lovely little dark green one with an orangey red flesh called “sweet little flower” were ready for picking. We farm workers ate dripping, pretty chunks like summer itself while we went about our harvest.
According to the book Fatal Harvest, “animals provide pollination services for over three-quarters of the staple crop plants that feed humankind and for 90 percent of flowering plants in the world.” Interestingly, the pollination services provided by honeybees are estimated at 60 to 100 times more valuable in economic terms than the market price of honey. It may be obvious, but we need these pollinators in a serious way.
Having taken an interest in the supreme role the bees are playing in making these melons come into being, I was alarmed to read that the National Academy of Sciences has been considering adding honeybees to the endangered species list. What is killing off our precious pollinators? Habitat is in decline as wild places turn over to development and the widespread use of pesticides is not only killing the nasty insects around lawns, farms and gardens, but as we know those broad-based agricultural chemicals also annihilate the benevolent species.
Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock with watermelon seeds and bees around 1929. All made their way south and soon Florida was the country’s largest producer of melons and these days the crop has an estimated annual value of around $60 million. Beekeepers in Florida often rent their bees to the melon growers when the vines are flowering, ensuring that the plants are fertilized. Each depends upon the other.
I am reminded of that fundamental of ecology: relationship. When the pollinators find those emerging yellow blossoms in the melon patch, the ensuing exchange is critical to a successful crop; it also a useful metaphor for the cantaloupe lovers among us as we pass through the world, find what we need, and move on. We human worker bees need to remove the veil, let the sun in on the growing thing, and do our best to support our partners (bees among them) in the work of growing good food, and sustaining agricultural into the future. Likewise, we’ll want to bear in mind the other needs of our oft forgotten pollinators: undisturbed or re-wilding habitat for foraging, nesting and roosting; native plants for sustaining healthy populations of wild pollinators who travel to our farm in search of nectar; and a wide eyed awareness that all synthetic agricultural chemicals are the death knell for so much of what is required for keeping this elegant system alive.
We humans tend to be concerned for the health and future of our own small plot of fertile land, but we’d do well to be thinking in terms of the patchwork of land around us too — how is it being treated and what kinds of habits and policies make it so.
In an era when pesticides are used as a matter of course in most farming operations, our farm prefers to embrace the bug life that results in fertile crops and happy bees. In exchange for some bee magic, we reflect on how our human actions support (or undermine) the pollinators. These kinds of calibrations are what sound farming depends upon, as does watermelon in August.
Over the coming weeks, you may be eating food from your own garden or another local farm. The fruit of flowering plants is coming to light: beans, potatoes, squash, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and melons will bring us delight and nourishment. They are gifts from the bees, as much as they are the produce of good soil, much water, the sun and many human hands.