The Principal Undergardener
usually writes funny, upbeat items about garden-related slices of life. I promise to return with something humorous
in a few days but, this morning, I have something festering in my mind that
needs to get down in words (and, no, it has nothing to do with politics).
It is a tale of a wasted
opportunity on a vital topic.
I have the pleasure to accompany
my wife to many garden club events around Massachusetts. Clubs enjoy meeting her and Betty relishes
the chance to take a few minutes to speak about what the state Federation is
doing, especially by way of education.
A week or so ago, we were at a
joint meeting of two clubs. A very nice garden
center kept its doors open and provided a great meeting space. Because the
event was well publicized, it drew a crowd of more than 75 people, many of them
non-garden-club-member guests drawn by the topic at hand. (I have purposely omitted names and details.)
The topic of the evening was
bees and the danger they face. There
were to be two presentations. One of
them was from a professional beekeeping service. The other was a librarian with a keen
interest in the subject.
The beekeeping company was not a
guy with a truck and some hives. Rather,
it is a firm with a presence in multiple cities. Its founder is a behavioral ecologist who has
written a lucid book on bees, and the company is quite adept at generating
positive publicity for itself.
The speaker, according to the
garden clubs’ flyer, was to have been the firm’s marketing director. For whatever reason, she wasn’t there. Instead, two of the company’s employees made
the presentation. What followed was a
disorganized and poorly presented program that was astonishingly short on
facts.
The two presenters were both in
their early twenties, and I’ll call them Ken and Barbie. Ken gave part of his presentation not
noticing he was standing between the projector and the screen. He delivered half of talk directly to Barbie,
who was standing to one side. He gave
the other half to the screen, where he read slides word for word. He occasionally glanced at the audience,
which noticed the absence of eye contact.
Ken would go backwards in the
presentation looking for a particular slide.
He also paused to speak about a particularly ‘cool’ graphic done by the
company’s ‘awesome’ in-house graphic artist; then apologized because the
graphic wasn’t really large enough to be seen beyond the front row. He also delivered his talk with one hand in
his pants pocket, which would ordinarily be grounds for criticism (it
telegraphs to an audience that you’re not serious) but, given the rest of his
transgressions, barely matters.
Barbie was better, but her part
of the talk comprised about 15% of the program.
Poor presentation can ruin a
program, but avoiding speaking about the ‘elephant in the room’ is
unforgivable. The presentation was
devoid of discussion of neonicotinoids in general; and
clothianidin, imiadcloprid, and thiamethoxam in
particular. Instead, according to Ken, colony
collapse occurs because “bees just wander off”.
The absence of such a discussion was puzzling. It lead one person with whom I spoke after
the presentation to wonder aloud if the beekeeping organization receives
funding from insecticide manufacturers.
Maybe the most bewildering
slides was a list of nectar/pollen plants available by month. I believe there was a single plant listed for
September with nothing thereafter, and Ken allowed that, “after August, there
isn’t much food out there for the bees.”
When questioned about the chart, Ken said the information in would be
updated when other sources were verified.
(Our garden has active bees and food plants for them into November; I offered
to supply Ken with my plant list.)
*
* * * *
It was, in short, a wasted
opportunity. The question I keep coming
back to is, ‘why’. There are two
possible answers. The first is that Ken
and Barbie were last minute substitutes who had never presented publicly and
were unfamiliar with the program they were supposed to give. That’s the charitable explanation. The other is that this beekeeping
organization considers garden clubs secondary or tertiary audiences that aren’t
worthy of sending in the ‘big guns’. If
so, they blew it. In the Q&A session
that followed, it was members of the audience who asked the tough questions,
citing specific chemicals and industry practices in detail.
The librarian’s presentation, on
the other hand, was well researched, carefully thought out, and well-presented – in short, infinitely better than the ‘professional’ one
the preceded it.
A reader might wonder why,
instead of venting in a blog, the Principal Undergardener didn’t express his
thoughts directly to the beekeeping company.
I did. I sent a detailed critique
to the company’s founder, chief scientist, and marketing director the day after
the presentation. I heard back… nothing.
