Honeybees and apples are intimately connected. Honeybees and corn share conjugal bonds as well. Interconnectedness. If anyone doubts the ramification our food choices have on our world, please read a recent article in London’s The Guardian entitled “Pesticides: Germany Bans Chemicals Linked to Honeybee Devastation:” “Germany has banned a family of pesticides that are blamed for the deaths of millions of honeybees. The German Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL) has suspended the registration for eight pesticide seed treatment products used in rapeseed oil and sweet corn. The move follows reports from German beekeepers in the Baden-Württemberg region that two thirds of their bees died earlier this month following the application of a pesticide called clothianidin.” Choose to eat sweet corn or an apple or any other vegetable or fruit grown conventionally, chances are you are contributing, as an accomplice—wittingly or not—to the death of honeybees. Maybe this news prompts a “So what?” Bees are bees are bees—some variation on yellow and black endowed with nasty stingers, all of them. (As a matter of fact, yellow jackets and hornets are the ornery, sting-happy bees and they are carnivorous. Is there a connection…?) Untrue. Take a look closer look at honeybees. Honeybees as they gather nectar from flowers, brush up against pollen and transfer the pollen, quite innocently, from flower to flower, plant to plant, apple tree to apple tree. Pollination is the movement of the male pollen to the female part of the flower—the stigma. Many fruits and vegetables that humans eat rely on cross pollination—and honey bees—to transfer this pollen. Bees transfer this pollen by either moving from tree to tree or when coming in contact with each other in the hive. No bees. No apples. No peaches. No melons. No corn. As a matter of fact “about a third of American food is a direct result of pollination by insects … more than 100 agricultural crops in the United States are pollinated by bees….” (From the ag.arizona.edu Web site)

Humans like apples. Apple trees need bees to produce apples. The human, blessed with intellect, can then deduce that choices matter. Food choices matter too. Support the farmer who respects nature enough to know that insecticides and pesticides don’t discriminate. They are equal opportunity killers—the harmful pest and the beneficial bee.

Westwind Orchard
“First, I fell in love with the house,” says Fabio Chizzola, “now I am in love with the trees.” The trees so beloved by this Italian by way of New York City, are apple trees—300 or so of them—that Fabio with the help of legendary pomologist, Mike Biltonen have restored over the last six years. “When I arrived here there were 500 trees. We cut out the dead or almost dead trees and kept the good ones but even the good ones are like old men. Losing their limbs.” Fabio, an international fashion photographer by weekday, arrived at farming because he used to rock climb the Shawangunks. Admittedly, the stone house caught his eye in 2002. “The trees were overgrown, the grass was waist high. I couldn’t even see the stone wall.” A stone wall in artful semi-collapse traverses the property next to the house. “We did nothing but prune for the first three years. I said to myself, if I don’t keep going, I will feel bad for the trees. This process of having this house and restoring this orchard has put me in touch with everything I disliked about my father when I was growing up in Italy.” Brought up in a lower class Roman family, Fabio recalls how his father would struggle to make ends meet and, on a small plot of land two hours outside of Rome, “would raise chickens and turkeys and farm everything for winter so we didn’t have to buy anything. Now, my friends play tennis on the weekends and I farm. Farming brings balance to my life.”

Fabio retained the original name —Westwind—of the orchard, existent in the same location since the 1970s. Before Fabio purchased the orchard, it lay fallow for five years, giving the land enough time (three years is the standard for organic certification) to heal itself from the sprays employed when it was operated as a conventional apple orchard. Westwind Orchard is Certified Naturally Grown (www.naturallygrown.com ): “basically organic without the paperwork,” says Mike Biltonen who has been involved with the orchard for the last four years. “CNG was started by Ron and Kathryn Khosla of Huguenot Street Farm (www.flyingbeet.com) in New Paltz. Farmers inspect other farmers: inspection is entirely internal within the organization and members have to adhere to the Organic Standards. CNG is for farmers who want to grow organic but either don’t want the hassle of all the paperwork or still have enough anarchism in them to not to want to be involved with the government.”

“My neighbor remembers the yellow plane that used to spray the orchard,” says Fabio. “I am more excited about the organic end of things, of the education aspect that you really can grow apples without spraying. My vision for the landscape design of the house and the orchard is entirely composed of plants that bees love.” On six acres in apple production (out of 32) Westwind produces the following Certified Naturally Grown apples: Early Macintosh, Macintosh, Cortland, Ida Red, Stayman, Red Delicious and Golden Delicious. The trees are forty to fifty year old vintage trees. “The usual commercial lifespan of an apple tree is twenty to thirty years but biologically, an apple tree can live for 70 years until it just about falls over. The original Red Delicious tree in Iowa died at 150 years.”

And the bees. Fabio and his wife, a stylist, recently conceived of a photo shot for Vogue Spain that involved a model in the midst of bees from one of his hives. “When the bees were out foraging we took away and hid one of the hives so when the bees who lived in that hive returned they hovered, waiting for their hive. We placed the model in the middle of this hazy bee cloud. Life in fashion involves so much first class travel and hotel stays—which is not real life—that we wanted to bring attention to an issue that is plaguing farmers—real life—everywhere.”

Westwind Orchard opened for business the weekend of September 13 and 14 2008 and will be open the following October weekends for U Pick: 4 and 5 and 11, 12 and 13 from 10 am until 6 pm. It is open all other times by appointment. For more information, please visit www.westwindorchard.com, call 845 674 5124, or e-mail: westwindorchard@mac.com. Westwind Orchard is located at 215 Lower Whitfield Road, Accord, New York.