Say Nothing

My father gave me a great piece of advice when I was a young boy. He said to me, ‘If you don’t know what you’re talking about …keep your mouth shut’.

Unfortunately, some of my so called ‘competitors’ don’t understand this concept and spout forth about subjects that they clearly don’t understand.

Browsing through the various ‘other’ company websites – as you do – I recently found an article about Japanese knotweed late season flowering and being ‘A great source of pollen for our native bees’.

The article was trying to suggest that Japanese knotweed had a place in our native landscape by providing nectar for native bees, thus conflicting with its ‘bad’ reputation. The writer was trying to be clever and suggest that perhaps the ‘evil’ Knotweed plant had been badly represented by its reputation as a destructive invader.

The problem here lies with the drunken bees.

Yes, they will enjoy the benefit of abundant nectar from the likes of Himalayan balsam and the late flowering Japanese knotweed….

…but …and here is the problem…. what would those bees have been doing if they weren’t out on a ‘bender’ drinking away at the alien ‘bar’ of Knotweed and Balsam …

Well, they’d have been doing what they should have been doing – which was pollinating NATIVE SPECIES.

So we have drunken bees misbehaving getting home late at night – telling the Queen that they’ve been behaving …..when actually they’ve been up to no good at all.

We have native species that aren’t getting pollinated because the draw of the sickly-sweet powerful alien nectar is too strong for the bees to ignore.

So, we get fewer and fewer native species surviving and a monoculture takeover of single species invasive invaders.

This, my dear competitor, is NOT GOOD and let’s be honest it’s another reason to kick these alien invading species back to where they belong in the Himalayas and the Japanese sub-continent.

Note, if you’re going to write about something – get your facts straight.

Mike C