Oprah didn't invent "gratitudes," but she popularized the idea for our generation. Being thankful for the everyday things in life may be the surest way to happiness. The obvious list begins with family, friends, and our health, in whatever measure we have them. Beyond that, gratitudes can get pretty variable. I'd like to share a quirky gratitude or two in this space. For instance: bees.

Most of my associations with bees are good ones. A.A. Milne comes to mind, in his poem from “When We Were Very Young” (1924). Pooh Bear is plotting for a honey snack by raiding a beehive high in a tree. While climbing the tree, attempting to seem nonchalant, he sings this ditty:

Isn't it funny

How a bear likes honey?

Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!

I wonder why he does?

It's a very funny thought that, if Bears were Bees,

They'd build their nests at the bottom of trees.

And that being so (if the Bees were Bears),

We shouldn't have to climb up all these stairs.

I liked to chant this as a child when I encountered bees while playing outside. Perhaps I thought this little incantation would protect me from stings. And since I don't remember any stings, maybe it worked. Sue Monk Kidd would agree. In her The Secret Life of Bees, she advises about dealing with bees, "If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates, while whistling melts, a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved."

Bees' value was broadly appreciated until last half century or so. Albert Einstein understood the importance of bees. Before there was cause for alarm, he wrote, "If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live." He died in 1955, halfway through the Baby Boom. Accommodating our millions with a construction boom, the natural landscape was so transformed by subdivisions and industrial farms that most of us were far removed from understanding bees as essential workers.

Simultaneously, the remaining natural spaces shrank to the point that farmers were forced to pay for something that bees had always provided for free: pollination. Beekeeping became a profitable business, with hives rented and moved about to pollinate orchards and fields.

But nature doesn't stand still, and now there's an interesting new twist to this story. Researchers are finding that native bees are cheaper (that is, free in a functioning habitat) and fertilize blossoms with much greater efficiency than imported ones. The scientific project measured bee activity in hundreds of fields on multiple continents, and calculated that "free-living bees were twice as effective as domesticated honeybees at prompting flowers to produce fruit." Also, according to the Journal of Science, the proportion of flowers that matured to fruit improved in every field visited by wild insects.

This is a major finding in an atmosphere where bee colony collapse disorder is decimating hives and rapidly increasing the cost of rented bees. In California, for instance, almond farmers collectively spend $239 million annually to rent more than 1 million beehives. Scientists speculate that when wild bees are present, competition forces the rented bees to work harder, flying more frequently among different varieties of trees in an orchard.

I love watching the wild things in my yard. We live in the foothills; our borrowed landscape includes winter-flowering Ceanothus and oak-studded mountains. When we moved to our current house a dozen years ago, the local native botanic garden encouraged us to plant native plants, explaining that plants from exotic gardens can "escape" to the wild via their wind-blown seeds. This can start new infestations of introduced plants whose own native predators don't keep them in check.

Over the years, I've enjoyed replacing much of my landscape with natives. In the process, I noticed something curious about the bees. The typical European honeybees are happy to pollinate anything – in scientific talk they're called "promiscuous." But the native bees --in particular the large, black stingless bumble bee has flourished. They make a beeline for my native plants. When my native plants are flowering, my garden is filled with these beautiful native bees. I feel at once grateful and awed at my tiny part in restoring the native landscape.

Emily Dickinson put it this way:

"To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few."

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