These insects, so essential to our agriculture and indeed to our landscape as we know it, deserve something better from us than the senseless destruction of their habitat. Honeybees and wild bees depend heavily on such ‘weeds’ as goldenrod, mustard, and dandelions for pollen that serves as the food for their young. Vetch furnishes essential spring forage for bees before the alfalfa is in bloom, tiding them over this early season so they are ready to pollinate the alfalfa. In the autumn they depend on goldenrod at a season when no other food is available, to stock up for the winter. By the precise and delicate timing that is nature’s own, the emergence of one species of wild bee takes place on the very day of the opening of the willow blossoms. There is no dearth of men who understand these things, but these are not the men who order the wholesale drenching of the landscape with chemicals.

                                                                                                         Rachel Carson, Excerpted from Silent Spring, Chapter 10 (1962)