Honey bees and wild bees

While all bees are incredibly precious and essential for our ecosystem, when we think of them we often picture just the honey ones in our mind: the more social ones, which work together in their fascinating big hives, which have a queen and, after using their barbed sting to defends themselves, die. They are not the only kind of bees that exist, still! The wild ones are their more solitary counterpart, and currently the most endangered.

Different in shapes, sizes and colours, because of the natural places that they usually nest in (dead wood, bare soil, hollow plants stems, to name a few), they are at a higher risk of habitat loss: with the construction of buildings and roads that replace the natural environment, these tiny friends of ours become homeless.

Also, human intervention interferes with their survival in more than another way, as for example with garden maintenance, that with the frequent removal of weeds and dead plants makes even parks or gardens deprived of nesting spots for them.

Wild bees have a crucial role in biodiversity, they help to make agriculture more resilient and many plants for pollination rely specifically on them, not just honey bees.

So, how can we help them?

• we can create bee hotels;
• we can leave them water on dishes with some stones, so that they can land on these while drinking;
• we can reduce the use of pesticides or, even better, avoid it!

This last mention introduces us to the little buddies that we are going to talk about next: pests and their predators.

All kind of pests that we can find in our gardens, like aphids (leaf lice), have their natural predators: if we wait for them to arrive, instead of trying to get rid of their presence with pesticides and any kind of chemicals, then they will protect our gardens all the season: ladybugs, hoverflies, lacewings, can all be our friendly allies and their presence is the sign of a healthy balanced ecosystem.

In nature everything has it’s own solution; we live in a system able to fix itself over and over, if we allow all the parts in play to do their part, by sometimes being humble enough to just sit and watch without interfering with it.

On the 26th of April a wool washing event, organised by Marcell Csillag, took place in the Aurora climate garden; let’s go through it together.

Marcell is a textile designer by training, currently doing his master’s in Regenerative Design. The complex issue of local wool processing has been catching his interest and curiosity and so, over the past year, he has decided to learn more about the topic and, consequently, to do something about it.

Why we talk about “issue”

Nowadays, many small wool processors in Europe are brought to a harsh reality difficult to avoid. The industry has been going through a decline during the past decades due to many causes (to mention a few, the lack of raw material and a broken economic system). This has been leading to the unlucky consequence of most of the small wool producers having to stop their production.

In organizing his event, Marcell has been specifically inspired by Tibor Fuller’s small industry in Pécsvárad, after hearing about the current situation that he, as many in his area of work, is facing: because of the previously mentioned crisis, he had to stop his production completely 3-4 years ago, since without any adequate market he is struggling to find someone to take over his machines and continue operating them.
That’s where Marcell’s idea stepped in, when he realized that some together could have done something to stop this from happening, with a little collaboration and good attitude.

The event

It’s here that we arrive at the wool washing event that has taken place in the Aurora climate garden on the 26th of April (which, against the weather previsions, happened to be an unexpectedly sunny, warm Saturday).
After hearing about it from Marcell’s Facebook post, many people came to participate even from the countryside, many whole families included. Each person full of enthusiasm and happy to be a part of it, which can be seen as a clear indicator of the strong desire to support the small realities, of the sense of community, that despite these apparently cold and individualistic modern times we are living through, seems to still be inside many of us.

Step by step

At 9 am, a little crowd was already reunited and ready to start, the required setup all in place: huge bags full of untreated wool, some bathtubs, huge pots, a big table. As the workshop began, while Marcell started to explain and guide the people present through each required step of the process, the troupe from a news channel was recording everything with their huge cameras; a joy for the outside eye, to see such collaboration and attention focused towards a little and at the same time infinitely big goal.

The process started at 9 am and continued until 5 pm in the afternoon, to allow each part of it to happen following the right timing. The wool — approximately 50 kilograms — had to be washed with hot water once, and then again with the detergent (an alkaline solution) twice, then rinsed with just water another 2 times. Afterwards, it was all passed through some high-speed spin-drying machines, and then at the end, finally laid on some pallets under the sun, white, soft and clean, to make sure it dried completely.

Final conclusions

So much can still be done and saved if we look at the good but not only; if we are enough honest with ourselves and the world around us to look at the bad too, knowledging what must and could be changed for the better, deciding to then do something about it ourselves, how we can, with what we currently have.

Positive change is rarely perfect or linear, and still it surely is always worth it, despite any of it.

Every little thing 

If you’ll visit the garden and have a look around, if you’ll ask questions about what catches your curiosity, you’ll soon realise how every little thing in it is serving its own purpose, as none of its parts are useless. 

It’s a small ecosystem with endless things happening inside of it, with each square of it serving its purpose by hosting animals and plants, even if some of them are almost invisible to the human eye. 

An open space for everyone 

If you’d like to join us and be a part of this little-big change you can do it at any time, and for as long as you’d like, everyone is welcome. Every Tuesday and Sunday from 3 pm to 6 pm the Aurora climate garden is an open-door community space, where anyone can join and help with the little tasks of the day, or even by just exploring around, enjoying the space or asking questions. 

Healing ourselves by healing the environment: the importance of green spaces in the city 

The act of gardening, or even just doing any kind of work in nature, surrounded by insects and leaves, has a powerful healing effect on us that can’t be denied: our nervous system suddenly starts to calm down, our mind is finally able to go at a lower and more human speed, our breath becomes quieter.