BEN HIRSCHLER
Reuters
November 20, 2007 at 8:10 PM EST
LONDON — The carnivorous pitcher plants that feed on insects in the Asian tropics may not snap shut like Venus flytraps, but they are smarter than they look.
Rather than being passive pitfall traps, the tube-like pitchers of Nepenthes plants actually contain a clever slimy fluid -- similar to mucus -- that produces powerful filaments to snare prey, French researchers said on Wednesday.
The unusual qualities of the fluid could one day be used to develop new, less environmentally harmful pesticides, the experts believe.
Just how pitcher plants catch their prey has intrigued biologists since Charles Darwin's time. Until now, it was thought that gravity and the slippery tube surface were the key, with the fluid in the pitcher simply helping digestion.
But Laurence Gaume at the University of Montpellier and Yoel Forterre from the University of Marseille have discovered that the fluid actually has the perfect viscoelastic properties to snare flies and ants.
"The elastic nature of the fluid is responsible for the huge spring-back forces that act on moving insects," Dr. Forterre said.
"The only chance for insects to escape the fluid would be to move slowly. But once they've fallen in the pitchers, insects most often panic and exhibit quick movements. It is like swimming in jelly."
The effect is seen even when the fluid is diluted more than 90 per cent with water, as can happen during heavy rainfall in the jungles of Borneo, where many of the plants grow.
The researchers have yet to identify the molecules responsible for the elastic properties of the fluid, which appears to be unique in the plant kingdom. But they believe the ingredient could help produce better pesticides in future.
Viscoelastic fluids or polymers are often added to pesticides and herbicides to prevent sprayed droplets from bouncing off plants, so limiting soil pollution.
The fluid from Nepenthes could provide new polymers that are both highly effective and environmentally friendly.
Showing posts with label Nerdiness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nerdiness. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
What Was Behind the Honey Bee Wipeout?
My friend M sent me this article from alternet.org
Everyone has a theory why the honeybees started dying off. Try malnutrition.
On Alan Wilson's table at the Oakland Farmers' Market, row after row of glass honey jars catch the early morning sun that angles down Ninth Street. Some of the honey gleams a reddish brown, some a paler amber, depending on the particular mix of flower species the bees foraged. All of it was produced by Wilson's colonies, which number a third of what he had last fall, before the infamous bee die-off that afflicted growers around the world. "I'd better get the honey while I can," one customer remarks.
The flurry of media attention given this winter's bee losses, now labeled "colony collapse disorder," has updated the world of bees for a heretofore-clueless public. Our image of honeybees is a lot like our bucolic images of farm animals -- and just as far from the brutal truth of today's corporate agriculture. We picture fields of clover, blossoming orchards, the wildflowers beneath the trees, filled with happy bees industriously gathering nectar and pollen to take back to the hive. As the bees gather pollen, they transfer it from plant to plant, thus assuring cross-pollination.
Fewer people can picture what happens at the hive, where the bees feed the protein-rich pollen to their developing brood. The adults live on honey they make from collected nectar -- sipped from the throats of flowers into the bees' honey stomachs, disgorged at the hive into the hexagonal wax combs made by the bees, fanned by bee wings to evaporate excess moisture until it reaches the perfect syrupy consistency, and then sealed with a wax cap to keep it clean and ready to sustain the colony over the winter. In order to do all this, bees rely on a diverse range of flowers blooming over a wide stretch of the year.
The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a European native, one of very few bee species in the world to store honey in bulk and live fulltime in large colonies (30,000 to 100,000 individuals). It is the only bee with a long history of intensive management by people. For almost all of this time, and continuing today in many parts of the world, the rosy picture of bee life painted above is largely accurate. But when beekeeping meets industrial agriculture, the result is very different. Colony collapse disorder may have many contributing causes, but it comes down to bees hitting the biological limits of our agricultural system. It's not so much a bee crisis as a pollination crisis. And we may end up calling it agricultural collapse disorder.
It's a rare beekeeper in the United States who can survive by selling honey. The trade loophole that has flooded this country with low-cost Chinese honey for the past ten years guaranteed that (fortunately for beekeepers, that hole has just been plugged by new federal tariff regulations). The only income remaining has been in pollination services. Alan Wilson's bees are rented out for almond pollination starting in February. After that they go south to the orange groves, then all the way to North Dakota where they make clover honey. Wilson's Central Valley location near Merced has little to offer bees over the dry summer months except roadside star thistle and the brief flowering of cantaloupes in August. Nearby agricultural chemicals are a concern, especially the defoliant used on cotton before harvest. Just the drift from the defoliant has taken the paint off Wilson's hives. Still, this year he plans to keep his bees closer to home where he can manage them more intensively and try to increase their numbers.
Every commercial beekeeper has different arrange-ments, but each involves long-distance trucking and the California almond crop. Almonds are entirely dependent on the seasonal importation of honeybees. Growers can't get crop insurance coverage unless they have at least two bee colonies per acre at almond blossom time; some growers use up to five colonies per acre for heavier yields. Over 800,000 Central Valley acres are planted in almond trees. As beekeeper Randy Oliver says, it is "monoculture at its absolute worst -- they don't allow one species of weed to grow": mile after mile of bare soil and almond trees. No native pollinators can survive on this wasted landscape to ease the honeybees' burden, and nothing lives to sustain bees before or after the almond bloom.
Truckloads of bees begin to arrive as early as November from all over the nation -- it takes virtually all of this country's commercially operated pollination colonies to cover California's almonds. While the bees roll down the highways, hive entrances boarded up, or wait in Central Valley bee yards for the trees to bloom, they're fed a mixture of high fructose corn syrup meant to replace nectar, along with soy protein meant to replace pollen. (Some beekeepers, Wilson among them, have switched to beet syrup as a safer though more expensive alternative.) Oliver sums up the patent absurdity: "When bugs from the east coast have to be trucked to California to pollinate an exotic tree because California has no bugs, it's a pretty whacked-out agricultural system."
Oliver's 500 bee colonies -- he was lucky, with losses under ten percent -- follow a relatively short migratory truck route that takes them from Central Valley almonds to Sierra foothill wildflowers to Nevada alfalfa. He attributes his success to fewer and shorter moves, reliance on pasture forage for much of the year, and avoidance of artificial feeding. "Some of these guys move their bees a dozen times a year," he says. Popular pollination routes include apples and blueberries, which rely on honeybees for 90 percent of their pollination, peaches (50 percent), and oranges (30 percent). Farmers won't bother planting squash or melons if they can't get beehives in place by bloom time. One-third of all US crops depend on honeybee pollination.
It hasn't been this way for long. Even 30 years ago growers could rely on a combination of native pollinating insects and local honeybees for most crops. In 1970, there were 35 beekeepers in Alan Wilson's area; now there are two. As farms grew more and more of fewer and fewer crops, using petrochemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, vast tracts of land have gradually approached the reductionist goal of supporting no life at all except the target crop. It's not just the almonds -- every crop is grown this way. That's why it's called industrial agriculture, or factory farming.
Bee researchers have been calling bees "the canary in this coal mine," a different version of the birds and the bees. A quote attributed to Albert Einstein has been popping up all over the Internet: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." Einstein never said it, but the instant ubiquity of the sentiment says everything.
Though the media only picked it up this year, bees have actually been in trouble for the past couple of decades. Mites -- parasitic insects small enough to use bees as their hosts -- jumped from other species to honeybees, another example of collateral damage from global transportation. First tracheal mites in the '80s, then varroa mites in the '90s -- even before last winter, the world's honeybee population had declined by half in 30 years.
UC Davis apiculturist Eric Mussen points out that before the mites arrived, winter losses of five to ten percent of a beekeeper's colonies were the norm. The mites increased yearly losses to 25 percent by the late '80s, and now we're at 40 percent or higher, with some years better than average and others catastrophic. Randy Oliver says, "If we made a list of collapses of the last 20 years, this winter's would not make the top five." Last year's losses were bad for Alan Wilson, but the last four years together have decimated his colonies by over 90 percent. The only beekeepers doing substantially better are the very small percentage practicing non-chemical mite control coupled with little or no trucking or artificial feeding -- in other words, labor-intensive vigilance combined with lower pollination income. It's not a financially viable option for many fulltime beekeepers.
The difference with this winter's losses is not having an identified cause, and therefore no quick (even if temporary) fix. For tracheal mites, beekeepers developed nontoxic preventive treatments -- Alan Wilson successfully doses his bees on a mixture of Crisco, sugar, and peppermint extract. Varroa mites proved trickier, and beekeepers started down the slippery slope of synthetic insecticide use. "Until the mid-'90s nobody dreamed of using chemicals in beehives," Oliver says. Once they did, the race was on, with insecticide-resistant varroa mites evolving neck-in-neck with the newest chemical treatment. European beekeepers, who have had the varroa mite longer, have pretty much given up on chemicals and use an Integrated Pest Management approach. US beekeepers who go this route find it labor- and attention-intensive, and effective within its parameters (not eradication but healthy bees living with a smaller number of mites). According to Oliver, "We're just prolonging our agony as long as we continue to use chemical treatments."
Everyone agrees the honeybee buzzed into the 21st century carrying a heavy load of stress. Colonies were weakened by mites, perhaps by chemicals used to kill the mites, and probably by at least some of the 25 different viruses carried by varroa mites. Add in a fungus, nosema, that's tolerated by healthy bees but a problem for already weakened hives. Then there's the stress of long-distance truck travel, longer distances for more bees every year. The small hive beetle, an African native recently found in Florida hives, posed another challenge; aggressive African honeybees attack the beetle, but European bees, bred to be docile, let it overrun the hive.
Cell phone interference has been proposed as a threat to bees, based on reports of a German study showing bees unable to find their way home in the presence of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. This particular theory must be called inconclusive at best, since the study was not designed with enough apicultural knowledge to produce reliable results.
No bee taken from the hive for the first time, as was done in the study, would be able to find its way back, since bees navigate primarily by landmarks, not electromagnetic homing sensors. Their first few excursions are short orientation flights, not blind trips in a box to a release point.
Of all these factors, many beekeepers judge varroa mites the most consistently debilitating. But there's another weakening influence more obvious and more integral to the larger agricultural dilemma. It's the stressor Mussen calls the most important of all -- bee malnutrition. High-fructose corn syrup and soy protein are not any more nutritious for bees than they are for humans (see Spring 2007), and bees in transit and between pollination jobs often must subsist on nothing but these non-foods. Compounding the problem, we're talking genetically modified corn and soy, every cell of which contains a bacterial insecticide. Are bees not insects? US studies have indicated that Bt corn pollen does not kill healthy bees or brood reared on it, but a German study showed that Bt pollen led to "significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" in hives already weakened by varroa mites.
We do know that corn pollen in general is poor bee food, high in fiber and low in protein. The Midwest, up until now the country's best bee forage habitat, this year is being planted much more aggressively to GM corn as a source for ethanol -- aggressive meaning planting marginal areas and edges usually left to the asters and goldenrods that are high-quality pollen sources in late summer when bees need to raise the generation that will overwinter. Even when bees are out foraging for real nectar and non-GMO pollen, for much of the year they are likely to be ingesting a monocultured diet due to their use as pollinators for industrial-scale agriculture -- nothing but almond, then nothing but apple, then only watermelon. They're exposed to pesticides used on their forage crops as well. Oh -- and one more influence to factor into the equation -- very hot weather can damage the protein content of pollen, decreasing its food value for bees. Global warming is kicking our butts from more directions than we can comprehend.
Given these conditions, last winter's losses can hardly be considered a surprise. Neither can the failure of bee researchers to come up with one specific cause, much less a magic bullet cure. Still, the kind of thinking that got us this far continues. According to Mussen, "the only hope is the USDA Tucson lab" which is working on a liquid feed that bees can eat all year. Randy Oliver calls this the "holy grail" of bee research. The USDA's proprietary formula, if they come up with one that works, will be patented and licensed to a commercial producer, and the whole agricultural system may manage to lurch along for a few more years, complete with pollinators hauled from Florida to California in time for the almond bloom.
How did all those almonds get pollinated this year, on the heels of beekeepers' discoveries that half (in some cases up to 90 percent) of their colonies had suddenly gone missing? It wouldn't have happened without a change in regulations that allowed bees to be imported from Australia. Bee businesses Down Under went into boom mode, sending 100,000 packages of bees to the States. A package is a starter kit of about 10,000 worker bees and a queen, enclosed in a small screened box with a sugar water feeder. The receiving beekeeper shakes the package into a waiting hive, and given proper nectar and pollen resources, within a month a new generation of bees will be expanding the colony.
The Australian influx may be short-lived, as a colony of Indian bees (Apis cerana) was recently discovered living aboard a yacht off Australia. The Indian bee is host to yet another mite that could wreak havoc if it spreads to the European honeybee. Another factor in almond pollination this year was the rental price for a bee colony, which averaged $150, nearly twice what it was last year. This was the first year in which the income beekeepers realized from almond pollination surpassed the income received for the entire US honey crop. There's talk of opening the Canadian border for next year's almond season.
To paraphrase Randy Oliver, we're prolonging our agony by continuing with this profoundly unworkable agricultural system. Suddenly terms like "organic" and "biodiversity" shift from boutique buzzwords to elements of survival. This country has 4,500 species of native insects that are potential pollinators. On the East Coast, where farms are much smaller, more diverse, and broken up by uncultivated land, native insects account for up to 90 percent of crop pollination. Studies done on Costa Rican coffee crops have shown that yields are 20 percent greater within one kilometer of forest remnants. Canadian canola farmers show increased yields by leaving 30 percent of their cropland wild. It's all about pollination.
Fortunately for us, insects are quick to recolonize formerly dead areas. Hedgerows, windbreaks, wetlands, woodlots -- the particulars of restoration agriculture are easy and already known. It's the big picture that's harder to shift, from the extractive industrial petrochemical model to the biodiverse ecosystem model. Honeybees have upped the ante, giving us all the motivation we need to change -- do we want to continue to eat?
The material appearing here is copyright Terrain magazine, which is published by the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California. (510-548-2235). The material is to be circulated for educational purposes only, and is not to be reprinted in any publication, or distributed for commercial purposes, including copying for sale, without the permission of the editor of Terrain.
Everyone has a theory why the honeybees started dying off. Try malnutrition.
On Alan Wilson's table at the Oakland Farmers' Market, row after row of glass honey jars catch the early morning sun that angles down Ninth Street. Some of the honey gleams a reddish brown, some a paler amber, depending on the particular mix of flower species the bees foraged. All of it was produced by Wilson's colonies, which number a third of what he had last fall, before the infamous bee die-off that afflicted growers around the world. "I'd better get the honey while I can," one customer remarks.
The flurry of media attention given this winter's bee losses, now labeled "colony collapse disorder," has updated the world of bees for a heretofore-clueless public. Our image of honeybees is a lot like our bucolic images of farm animals -- and just as far from the brutal truth of today's corporate agriculture. We picture fields of clover, blossoming orchards, the wildflowers beneath the trees, filled with happy bees industriously gathering nectar and pollen to take back to the hive. As the bees gather pollen, they transfer it from plant to plant, thus assuring cross-pollination.
Fewer people can picture what happens at the hive, where the bees feed the protein-rich pollen to their developing brood. The adults live on honey they make from collected nectar -- sipped from the throats of flowers into the bees' honey stomachs, disgorged at the hive into the hexagonal wax combs made by the bees, fanned by bee wings to evaporate excess moisture until it reaches the perfect syrupy consistency, and then sealed with a wax cap to keep it clean and ready to sustain the colony over the winter. In order to do all this, bees rely on a diverse range of flowers blooming over a wide stretch of the year.
The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a European native, one of very few bee species in the world to store honey in bulk and live fulltime in large colonies (30,000 to 100,000 individuals). It is the only bee with a long history of intensive management by people. For almost all of this time, and continuing today in many parts of the world, the rosy picture of bee life painted above is largely accurate. But when beekeeping meets industrial agriculture, the result is very different. Colony collapse disorder may have many contributing causes, but it comes down to bees hitting the biological limits of our agricultural system. It's not so much a bee crisis as a pollination crisis. And we may end up calling it agricultural collapse disorder.
It's a rare beekeeper in the United States who can survive by selling honey. The trade loophole that has flooded this country with low-cost Chinese honey for the past ten years guaranteed that (fortunately for beekeepers, that hole has just been plugged by new federal tariff regulations). The only income remaining has been in pollination services. Alan Wilson's bees are rented out for almond pollination starting in February. After that they go south to the orange groves, then all the way to North Dakota where they make clover honey. Wilson's Central Valley location near Merced has little to offer bees over the dry summer months except roadside star thistle and the brief flowering of cantaloupes in August. Nearby agricultural chemicals are a concern, especially the defoliant used on cotton before harvest. Just the drift from the defoliant has taken the paint off Wilson's hives. Still, this year he plans to keep his bees closer to home where he can manage them more intensively and try to increase their numbers.
Every commercial beekeeper has different arrange-ments, but each involves long-distance trucking and the California almond crop. Almonds are entirely dependent on the seasonal importation of honeybees. Growers can't get crop insurance coverage unless they have at least two bee colonies per acre at almond blossom time; some growers use up to five colonies per acre for heavier yields. Over 800,000 Central Valley acres are planted in almond trees. As beekeeper Randy Oliver says, it is "monoculture at its absolute worst -- they don't allow one species of weed to grow": mile after mile of bare soil and almond trees. No native pollinators can survive on this wasted landscape to ease the honeybees' burden, and nothing lives to sustain bees before or after the almond bloom.
Truckloads of bees begin to arrive as early as November from all over the nation -- it takes virtually all of this country's commercially operated pollination colonies to cover California's almonds. While the bees roll down the highways, hive entrances boarded up, or wait in Central Valley bee yards for the trees to bloom, they're fed a mixture of high fructose corn syrup meant to replace nectar, along with soy protein meant to replace pollen. (Some beekeepers, Wilson among them, have switched to beet syrup as a safer though more expensive alternative.) Oliver sums up the patent absurdity: "When bugs from the east coast have to be trucked to California to pollinate an exotic tree because California has no bugs, it's a pretty whacked-out agricultural system."
Oliver's 500 bee colonies -- he was lucky, with losses under ten percent -- follow a relatively short migratory truck route that takes them from Central Valley almonds to Sierra foothill wildflowers to Nevada alfalfa. He attributes his success to fewer and shorter moves, reliance on pasture forage for much of the year, and avoidance of artificial feeding. "Some of these guys move their bees a dozen times a year," he says. Popular pollination routes include apples and blueberries, which rely on honeybees for 90 percent of their pollination, peaches (50 percent), and oranges (30 percent). Farmers won't bother planting squash or melons if they can't get beehives in place by bloom time. One-third of all US crops depend on honeybee pollination.
It hasn't been this way for long. Even 30 years ago growers could rely on a combination of native pollinating insects and local honeybees for most crops. In 1970, there were 35 beekeepers in Alan Wilson's area; now there are two. As farms grew more and more of fewer and fewer crops, using petrochemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, vast tracts of land have gradually approached the reductionist goal of supporting no life at all except the target crop. It's not just the almonds -- every crop is grown this way. That's why it's called industrial agriculture, or factory farming.
Bee researchers have been calling bees "the canary in this coal mine," a different version of the birds and the bees. A quote attributed to Albert Einstein has been popping up all over the Internet: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." Einstein never said it, but the instant ubiquity of the sentiment says everything.
Though the media only picked it up this year, bees have actually been in trouble for the past couple of decades. Mites -- parasitic insects small enough to use bees as their hosts -- jumped from other species to honeybees, another example of collateral damage from global transportation. First tracheal mites in the '80s, then varroa mites in the '90s -- even before last winter, the world's honeybee population had declined by half in 30 years.
UC Davis apiculturist Eric Mussen points out that before the mites arrived, winter losses of five to ten percent of a beekeeper's colonies were the norm. The mites increased yearly losses to 25 percent by the late '80s, and now we're at 40 percent or higher, with some years better than average and others catastrophic. Randy Oliver says, "If we made a list of collapses of the last 20 years, this winter's would not make the top five." Last year's losses were bad for Alan Wilson, but the last four years together have decimated his colonies by over 90 percent. The only beekeepers doing substantially better are the very small percentage practicing non-chemical mite control coupled with little or no trucking or artificial feeding -- in other words, labor-intensive vigilance combined with lower pollination income. It's not a financially viable option for many fulltime beekeepers.
The difference with this winter's losses is not having an identified cause, and therefore no quick (even if temporary) fix. For tracheal mites, beekeepers developed nontoxic preventive treatments -- Alan Wilson successfully doses his bees on a mixture of Crisco, sugar, and peppermint extract. Varroa mites proved trickier, and beekeepers started down the slippery slope of synthetic insecticide use. "Until the mid-'90s nobody dreamed of using chemicals in beehives," Oliver says. Once they did, the race was on, with insecticide-resistant varroa mites evolving neck-in-neck with the newest chemical treatment. European beekeepers, who have had the varroa mite longer, have pretty much given up on chemicals and use an Integrated Pest Management approach. US beekeepers who go this route find it labor- and attention-intensive, and effective within its parameters (not eradication but healthy bees living with a smaller number of mites). According to Oliver, "We're just prolonging our agony as long as we continue to use chemical treatments."
Everyone agrees the honeybee buzzed into the 21st century carrying a heavy load of stress. Colonies were weakened by mites, perhaps by chemicals used to kill the mites, and probably by at least some of the 25 different viruses carried by varroa mites. Add in a fungus, nosema, that's tolerated by healthy bees but a problem for already weakened hives. Then there's the stress of long-distance truck travel, longer distances for more bees every year. The small hive beetle, an African native recently found in Florida hives, posed another challenge; aggressive African honeybees attack the beetle, but European bees, bred to be docile, let it overrun the hive.
Cell phone interference has been proposed as a threat to bees, based on reports of a German study showing bees unable to find their way home in the presence of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. This particular theory must be called inconclusive at best, since the study was not designed with enough apicultural knowledge to produce reliable results.
No bee taken from the hive for the first time, as was done in the study, would be able to find its way back, since bees navigate primarily by landmarks, not electromagnetic homing sensors. Their first few excursions are short orientation flights, not blind trips in a box to a release point.
Of all these factors, many beekeepers judge varroa mites the most consistently debilitating. But there's another weakening influence more obvious and more integral to the larger agricultural dilemma. It's the stressor Mussen calls the most important of all -- bee malnutrition. High-fructose corn syrup and soy protein are not any more nutritious for bees than they are for humans (see Spring 2007), and bees in transit and between pollination jobs often must subsist on nothing but these non-foods. Compounding the problem, we're talking genetically modified corn and soy, every cell of which contains a bacterial insecticide. Are bees not insects? US studies have indicated that Bt corn pollen does not kill healthy bees or brood reared on it, but a German study showed that Bt pollen led to "significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" in hives already weakened by varroa mites.
We do know that corn pollen in general is poor bee food, high in fiber and low in protein. The Midwest, up until now the country's best bee forage habitat, this year is being planted much more aggressively to GM corn as a source for ethanol -- aggressive meaning planting marginal areas and edges usually left to the asters and goldenrods that are high-quality pollen sources in late summer when bees need to raise the generation that will overwinter. Even when bees are out foraging for real nectar and non-GMO pollen, for much of the year they are likely to be ingesting a monocultured diet due to their use as pollinators for industrial-scale agriculture -- nothing but almond, then nothing but apple, then only watermelon. They're exposed to pesticides used on their forage crops as well. Oh -- and one more influence to factor into the equation -- very hot weather can damage the protein content of pollen, decreasing its food value for bees. Global warming is kicking our butts from more directions than we can comprehend.
Given these conditions, last winter's losses can hardly be considered a surprise. Neither can the failure of bee researchers to come up with one specific cause, much less a magic bullet cure. Still, the kind of thinking that got us this far continues. According to Mussen, "the only hope is the USDA Tucson lab" which is working on a liquid feed that bees can eat all year. Randy Oliver calls this the "holy grail" of bee research. The USDA's proprietary formula, if they come up with one that works, will be patented and licensed to a commercial producer, and the whole agricultural system may manage to lurch along for a few more years, complete with pollinators hauled from Florida to California in time for the almond bloom.
How did all those almonds get pollinated this year, on the heels of beekeepers' discoveries that half (in some cases up to 90 percent) of their colonies had suddenly gone missing? It wouldn't have happened without a change in regulations that allowed bees to be imported from Australia. Bee businesses Down Under went into boom mode, sending 100,000 packages of bees to the States. A package is a starter kit of about 10,000 worker bees and a queen, enclosed in a small screened box with a sugar water feeder. The receiving beekeeper shakes the package into a waiting hive, and given proper nectar and pollen resources, within a month a new generation of bees will be expanding the colony.
The Australian influx may be short-lived, as a colony of Indian bees (Apis cerana) was recently discovered living aboard a yacht off Australia. The Indian bee is host to yet another mite that could wreak havoc if it spreads to the European honeybee. Another factor in almond pollination this year was the rental price for a bee colony, which averaged $150, nearly twice what it was last year. This was the first year in which the income beekeepers realized from almond pollination surpassed the income received for the entire US honey crop. There's talk of opening the Canadian border for next year's almond season.
To paraphrase Randy Oliver, we're prolonging our agony by continuing with this profoundly unworkable agricultural system. Suddenly terms like "organic" and "biodiversity" shift from boutique buzzwords to elements of survival. This country has 4,500 species of native insects that are potential pollinators. On the East Coast, where farms are much smaller, more diverse, and broken up by uncultivated land, native insects account for up to 90 percent of crop pollination. Studies done on Costa Rican coffee crops have shown that yields are 20 percent greater within one kilometer of forest remnants. Canadian canola farmers show increased yields by leaving 30 percent of their cropland wild. It's all about pollination.
Fortunately for us, insects are quick to recolonize formerly dead areas. Hedgerows, windbreaks, wetlands, woodlots -- the particulars of restoration agriculture are easy and already known. It's the big picture that's harder to shift, from the extractive industrial petrochemical model to the biodiverse ecosystem model. Honeybees have upped the ante, giving us all the motivation we need to change -- do we want to continue to eat?
The material appearing here is copyright Terrain magazine, which is published by the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California. (510-548-2235). The material is to be circulated for educational purposes only, and is not to be reprinted in any publication, or distributed for commercial purposes, including copying for sale, without the permission of the editor of Terrain.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Some Video from Kruger National Park in South Africa
This video is crazy, but really worth watching to the end.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Anthropologists eat this shit up
Thanks to my brother for sending me this article.
Is Prince Philip an island god?
Is Prince Philip an island god?
| By Nick Squires BBC News, Vanuatu |
Britain's Duke of Edinburgh may be planning a quiet birthday celebration at home this weekend, but there will be feasting and flag-waving in an isolated jungle village in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, where he is worshipped as a god.
The islanders associate Prince Philip with a mountain spirit
The Land Cruiser ground up the rough dirt track, pitching and rolling like a boat. The trail was so severely eroded that it was more like a river bed, with miniature canyons gouged out by the monsoon rains.
I had been drawn to this poor excuse for a road by a story so unlikely that it sounded barely credible.
It was one I had wanted to investigate for years.
Legend had it that there was a clutch of villages on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu which - as bizarre as it may seem - worshipped Prince Philip as a god.
How and why they had chosen the Duke of Edinburgh, I had no idea. I fully expected the story to be either false, or wildly exaggerated.
Distant adoration
After an hour's drive we pulled into a jungle clearing shaded by giant banyan trees.
A short walk led to the village of Yaohnanen, a collection of sagging thatched huts, banana trees and snotty-nosed little kids.
With the help of my driver-cum-interpreter, Lui, I was introduced to the chief of the village. Jack Naiva was a bright-eyed old man of about 80, with grey hair and a faded sarong wrapped around his wiry body.
I felt deeply foolish telling him I had come to his village to ask if he worshipped the Queen's husband.
I wondered if it was all some sort of elaborate joke.
But the look on Chief Jack's face told me it was not. He dispatched one of the villagers and a few minutes later the man returned from a hut with three framed pictures. 
Jack Naiva, chief of the village, has an official portrait of the Prince
They were all official portraits of the Prince.
The first, in black and white, looked like it was taken in the early 1960s.
The second was dated 1980 and showed the Prince holding a traditional pig-killing club - a present from the islanders.
The most recent was from seven years ago.
They had all been sent from London with the discreet permission of Prince Philip, who is apparently well aware that he is the subject of such distant adoration.
Ancient legend
Chief Jack squatted on the ground as he told me how the Prince Philip cult had come about.
It seems that it emerged some time in the 1960s, when Vanuatu was an Anglo-French colony known as the New Hebrides.
For centuries, perhaps millennia, villagers had believed in an ancient story about the son of a mountain spirit venturing across the seas to look for a powerful woman to marry.
They believed that unlike them, this spirit had pale skin.
Somehow the legend gradually became associated with Prince Philip, who had indeed married a rich and powerful lady.
Villagers would have seen his portrait - and that of the Queen - in government outposts and police stations run by British colonial officials.
Their beliefs were bolstered in 1974, when the Queen and Prince Philip made an official visit to the New Hebrides. Here was their ancestral spirit, resplendent in a white naval officer's uniform, come back to show off his bride.
"He's a god, not a man," the chief told me emphatically, pointing at the portraits.
Response to colonialism
None of the cult followers can read or write.
Prince Philip gave permission for portraits to be sent from London
They told me - somewhat amazingly - that it was only this year that they learnt the date of the Prince's birthday - 10 June.
As Philip turns 86 and they are planning to mark the occasion with a feast and ceremonial drinking of kava, an intoxicating brew made from the roots of a pepper tree which makes your mouth go numb.
They have even acquired a large Union flag which they are going to run up a bamboo flag pole.
It is easy to see all this as so much South Seas mumbo jumbo.
But that would be a grave mistake, anthropologists told me.
Millennial movements like this were a highly sophisticated response by islanders in the South Pacific to the arrival of colonialism and Christianity.
By combining the fundamentals of their ancient beliefs with new elements gleaned from their contact with the West, they were able to preserve their culture.
There is, of course, a delicious irony in all this.
Prince Philip, after all, is a man who has a reputation for making politically incorrect gaffes, often about foreigners.
He once advised British students not to stay too long in China for fear of becoming "slitty-eyed".
And he asked a group of stunned aborigines if they still threw spears at each other.
The villagers of Tanna may live a life far removed from the splendour of Buckingham Palace and Balmoral in far away Britain. But they are as firm in their beliefs as Prince Philip is in his.
I suspect that if they were ever to meet, they would get along rather well.
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday 9 June 2007 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.Thursday, June 07, 2007
Swiss and Italian scientists conclude arrow killed frozen mummy
Published: Wednesday, June 6, 2007 | 2:19 PM ET
Canadian Press
Canadian Press
ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) - Swiss and Italian scientists say they have solved the mystery surrounding the death of the prehistoric hunter frozen in a glacier for more than 5,000 years.
They say the man known as Oetzi bled to death after being struck in the back by an arrow.
According to the researchers, the arrow tore a hole in an artery beneath his left collarbone, leading to massive loss of blood and shock and causing Oetzi to suffer a heart attack.
Their findings were published online in the Journal of Archeological Science.
Oetzi became a celebrity after his well-preserved body was accidentally discovered by hikers in 1991 on a glacier more than 3,000 metres above sea level on the border between Austria and Italy.
Archeologists believe Oetzi may have been killed in a skirmish with a rival tribe.
The researchers used newly developed medical scanners to examine the frozen corpse.
Even today, the chances of surviving such an injury long enough to receive hospital treatment are only 40 per cent, according to the article.
The fact that the arrow's shaft was pulled out before his death may have worsened the injury, said Frank Ruehli of the University of Zurich, who carried out the research with scientists from Bolzano, Italy, where the iceman's body is preserved.
The use of high-resolution computer tomography - normally used to diagnose living patients - allowed the researchers to create three-dimensional images of Oetzi without having to use surgical procedures that would have damaged the body.
"Five years ago this would definitely have been more difficult," Ruehli told The Associated Press.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Al Gore calls Tories' green plan a `fraud'
Apr 28, 2007 07:02 PM
Canadian Press
The Conservatives' new environmental platform is a ``complete and total fraud" that is "designed to mislead the Canadian people," former U.S. vice-president Al Gore said today.
The noted environmentalist was presenting his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" in Toronto at a consumer environmental show, with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and environmentalist David Suzuki in attendance.
Gore praised Suzuki for confronting Environment Minister John Baird on Friday, saying he saw the two exchange words on TV.
When Baird told Suzuki the Conservatives were going further than any other government in Canadian history, Suzuki said it wasn't enough.
The Conservative government strategy focuses on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving air quality. But the plan failed to spell out precisely what many of its regulations will look like.
"In my opinion, it is a complete and total fraud," Gore said. ``It is designed to mislead the Canadian people."
Gore acknowledged he is not a Canadian citizen and said he has ``no right to interfere in your decisions."
However, he said, the rest of the world looks to Canada for moral leadership, and that's why this week's announcement was so "shocking."
Baird released a statement later in the day in which he refuted Gore's criticisms.
"The fact is our plan is vastly tougher than any measures introduced by the administration of which the former vice president was a member," Baird said in the statement.
Baird's statement also offered an invitation for Gore to discuss climate change and the Conservatives' environmental policies with him.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Britain fights Japan's bid to control whaling commission
Britain fights Japan's bid to control whaling commission By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Published: 16 April 2007
Britain has led an anti-whaling fightback against Japan's attempts to take control of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and scrap the international ban on commercial hunting of the great whales.
A British diplomatic campaign has led to six nations joining the IWC - countries who in May will vote with the anti-whalers and thus nullify the voting majority which Japan and its pro-whaling allies secured in the organisation for the first time last year, at the IWC meeting in St Kitts and Nevis in the West Indies. The six who will line up against Japan in Anchorage, Alaska, are Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, Croatia, Peru and Costa Rica.
Greece and Cyprus have come on board after a British lobbying campaign in which a glossy brochure, setting out the case against whaling and jointly signed by Tony Blair and the doyen of British environmentalists, Sir David Attenborough, was sent to 57 governments, including new European Union members.
Slovenia and Croatia joined up after earlier British encouragement, and the two Latin American countries will be voting because they have paid up the arrears in their IWC subscriptions (which last year prevented them) - Peru at the prompting of the British and Costa Rica after a campaign by US environmentalists.
It is possible that further countries may join the IWC on the anti-whaling side, although not in time for the Anchorage meeting. "We think there may be as many as four more waiting in the wings," said the Environment minister, Ben Bradshaw, the man behind the brochure initiative.
Last year's Japanese majority was secured after a decade-long campaign of persuading small countries to join the IWC and vote with Japan in return for substantial aid packages. So in a sense Britain and the other anti-whaling nations, such as the US and Australia, have been playing the Japanese at their own game.
Senior British sources are confident that the votes of the six new members will be enough to nullify the Japanese majority. In St Kitts it was achieved at only one vote, and as it was a simple 51 per cent majority, it was was short of the 75 per cent needed to overturn the whaling moratorium.
But it did enable the Japanese and their pro-whaling allies, led by Norway and Iceland, to pass the so-called "St Kitts declaration", which said that the 1986 international moratorium was no longer necessary, and that as whales consumed "huge quantities of fish", whale hunting was now necessary for food security for poor nations (strongly disputed by anti-whaling countries). This signalled that the campaign to reopen commercial whaling was in full swing. "It was a considerable propaganda coup," Mr Bradshaw said.
If the Japanese majority can be decisively overturned, a counter-resolution is certain. "It is essential to get the majority back, and push through a new resolution reaffirming support for the moratorium," said Mark Simmonds, international director of science for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.
Cell phone link to honey bee die-offs?
Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?
Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees
By Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross
Published: 15 April 2007
It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.
They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.
The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.
The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.
CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned.
Other apiarists have recorded losses in Scotland, Wales and north-west England, but the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs insisted: "There is absolutely no evidence of CCD in the UK."
The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world's crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, "man would have only four years of life left".
No one knows why it is happening. Theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops have been proposed, but all have drawbacks.
German research has long shown that bees' behaviour changes near power lines.
Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby. Dr Jochen Kuhn, who carried it out, said this could provide a "hint" to a possible cause.
Dr George Carlo, who headed a massive study by the US government and mobile phone industry of hazards from mobiles in the Nineties, said: "I am convinced the possibility is real."
The case against handsets
Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up.
Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset.
Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.
Studies in India and the US have raised the possibility that men who use mobile phones heavily have reduced sperm counts. And, more prosaically, doctors have identified the condition of "text thumb", a form of RSI from constant texting.
Professor Sir William Stewart, who has headed two official inquiries, warned that children under eight should not use mobiles and made a series of safety recommendations, largely ignored by ministers.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
He's much more reasonable than the Yanks would have you believe....
Weekend Edition
April 7 / 8, 2007
And Other Reflections on the Internationalization of Genocide
Where Have All the Bees Gone?
By FIDEL CASTRO
The Camp David meeting has just come to an end. All of us followed the press conference offered by the presidents of the United States and Brazil attentively, as we did the news surrounding the meeting and the opinions voiced in this connection.
Faced with demands related to customs duties and subsidies which protect and support US ethanol production, Bush did not make the slightest concession to his Brazilian guest at Camp David.
President Lula attributed to this the rise in corn prices, which, according to his own statements, had gone up more than 85 percent.
Before these statements were made, the Washington Post had published an article by the Brazilian leader which expounded on the idea of transforming food into fuel.
It is not my intention to hurt Brazil or to meddle in the internal affairs of this great country. It was in effect in Rio de Janeiro, host of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, exactly 15 years ago, where I delivered a 7-minute speech vehemently denouncing the environmental dangers that menaced our species' survival. Bush Sr., then President of the United States, was present at that meeting and applauded my words out of courtesy; all other presidents there applauded, too.
No one at Camp David answered the fundamental question. Where are the more than 500 million tons of corn and other cereals which the United States, Europe and wealthy nations require to produce the gallons of ethanol that big companies in the United States and other countries demand in exchange for their voluminous investments going to be produced and who is going to supply them? Where are the soy, sunflower and rape seeds, whose essential oils these same, wealthy nations are to turn into fuel, going to be produced and who will produce them?
Some countries are food producers which export their surpluses. The balance of exporters and consumers had already become precarious before this and food prices had skyrocketed. In the interests of brevity, I shall limit myself to pointing out the following:
According to recent data, the five chief producers of corn, barley, sorghum, rye, millet and oats which Bush wants to transform into the raw material of ethanol production, supply the world market with 679 million tons of these products. Similarly, the five chief consumers, some of which also produce these grains, currently require 604 million annual tons of these products. The available surplus is less than 80 million tons of grain.
This colossal squandering of cereals destined to fuel production -and these estimates do not include data on oily seeds-shall serve to save rich countries less than 15 percent of the total annual consumption of their voracious automobiles.
At Camp David, Bush declared his intention of applying this formula around the world. This spells nothing other than the internationalization of genocide.
In his statements, published by the Washington Post on the eve of the Camp David meeting, the Brazilian president affirmed that less than one percent of Brazil's arable land was used to grow cane destined to ethanol production. This is nearly three times the land surface Cuba used when it produced nearly 10 million tons of sugar a year, before the crisis that befell the Soviet Union and the advent of climate changes.
Our country has been producing and exporting sugar for a longer time. First, on the basis of the work of slaves, whose numbers swelled to over 300 thousand in the first years of the 19th century and who turned the Spanish colony into the world's number one exporter. Nearly one hundred years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, when Cuba was a pseudo-republic which had been denied full independence by US interventionism, it was immigrants from the West Indies and illiterate Cubans alone who bore the burden of growing and harvesting sugarcane on the island. The scourge of our people was the off-season, inherent to the cyclical nature of the harvest. Sugarcane plantations were the property of US companies or powerful Cuban-born landowners. Cuba, thus, has more experience than anyone as regards the social impact of this crop.
This past Sunday, April 1, CNN televised the opinions of Brazilian experts who affirm that many lands destined to sugarcane have been purchased by wealthy Americans and Europeans.
As part of my reflections on the subject, published on March 29, I expounded on the impact climate change has had on Cuba and on other basic characteristics of our country's climate which contribute to this.
On our poor and anything but consumerist island, one would be unable to find enough workers to endure the rigors of the harvest and to care for the sugarcane plantations in the ever more intense heat, rains or droughts. When hurricanes lash the island, not even the best machines can harvest the bent-over and twisted canes. For centuries, the practice of burning sugarcane was unknown and no soil was compacted under the weight of complex machines and enormous trucks. Nitrogen, potassium and phosphate fertilizers, today extremely expensive, did not yet even exist, and the dry and wet months succeeded each other regularly. In modern agriculture, no high yields are possible without crop rotation methods.
On Sunday, April 1, the French Press Agency (AFP) published disquieting reports on the subject of climate change, which experts gathered by the United Nations already consider an inevitable phenomenon that will spell serious repercussions for the world in the coming decades.
According to a UN report to be approved next week in Brussels, climate change will have a significant impact on the American continent, generating more violent storms and heat waves and causing droughts, the extinction of some species and even hunger in Latin America.
The AFP report indicates that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forewarned that at the end of this century, every hemisphere will endure water-related problems and, if governments take no measures in this connection, rising temperatures could increase the risks of mortality, contamination, natural catastrophes and infectious diseases.
In Latin America, global warming is already melting glaciers in the Andes and threatening the Amazon forest, whose perimeter may slowly be turned into a savannah, the cable goes on to report.
Because a great part of its population lives near the coast, the United States is also vulnerable to extreme natural phenomena, as hurricane Katrina demonstrated in 2005.
According to AFP, this is the second of three IPCC reports which began to be published last February, following an initial scientific forecast which established the certainty of climate change.
This second 1400-page report which analyzes climate change in different sectors and regions, of which AFP has obtained a copy, considers that, even if radical measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that pollute the atmosphere are taken, the rise in temperatures around the planet in the coming decades is already unavoidable, concludes the French Press Agency.
As was to be expected, at the Camp David meeting, Dan Fisk, National Security advisor for the region, declared that "in the discussion on regional issues, [I expect] Cuba to come up () if there's anyone that knows how to create starvation, it's Fidel Castro. He also knows how not to do ethanol".
As I find myself obliged to respond to this gentleman, it is my duty to remind him that Cuba's infant mortality rate is lower than the United States'. All citizens -- this is beyond question -- enjoy free medical services. Everyone has access to education and no one is denied employment, in spite of nearly half a century of economic blockade and the attempts of US governments to starve and economically asphyxiate the people of Cuba.
China would never devote a single ton of cereals or leguminous plants to the production of ethanol, and it is an economically prosperous nation which is breaking growth records, where all citizens earn the income they need to purchase essential consumer items, despite the fact that 48 percent of its population, which exceeds 1.3 billion, works in agriculture. On the contrary, it has set out to reduce energy consumption considerably by shutting down thousands of factories which consume unacceptable amounts of electricity and hydrocarbons. It imports many of the food products mentioned above from far-off corners of the world, transporting these over thousands of miles.
Scores of countries do not produce hydrocarbons and are unable to produce corn and other grains or oily seeds, for they do not even have enough water to meet their most basic needs.
At a meeting on ethanol production held in Buenos Aires by the Argentine Oil Industry Chamber and Cereals Exporters Association, Loek Boonekamp, the Dutch head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)'s commercial and marketing division, told the press that governments are very much enthused about this process but that they should objectively consider whether ethanol ought to be given such resolute support.
According to Boonekamp, the United States is the only country where ethanol can be profitable and, without subsidies, no other country can make it viable.
According to the report, Boonekamp insists that ethanol is not manna from Heaven and that we should not blindly commit to developing this process.
Today, developed countries are pushing to have fossil fuels mixed with biofuels at around five percent and this is already affecting agricultural prices. If this figure went up to 10 percent, 30 percent of the United States' cultivated surface and 50 percent of Europe's would be required. That is the reason Boonekamp asks himself whether the process is sustainable, as an increase in the demand for crops destined to ethanol production would generate higher and less stable prices.
Protectionist measures are today at 54 cents per gallon and real subsidies reach far higher figures.
Applying the simple arithmetic we learned in high school, we could show how, by simply replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones, as I explained in my previous reflections, millions and millions of dollars in investment and energy could be saved, without the need to use a single acre of farming land.
In the meantime, we are receiving news from Washington, through the AP, reporting that the mysterious disappearance of millions of bees throughout the United States has edged beekeepers to the brink of a nervous breakdown and is even cause for concern in Congress, which will discuss this Thursday the critical situation facing this insect, essential to the agricultural sector. According to the report, the first disquieting signs of this enigma became evident shortly after Christmas in the state of Florida, when beekeepers discovered that their bees had vanished without a trace. Since then, the syndrome which experts have christened as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has reduced the country's swarms by 25 percent.
Daniel Weaver, president of the US Beekeepers Association, stated that more than half a million colonies, each with a population of nearly 50 thousand bees, had been lost. He added that the syndrome has struck 30 of the country's 50 states. What is curious about the phenomenon is that, in many cases, the mortal remains of the bees are not found.
According to a study conducted by Cornell University, these industrious insects pollinate crops valued at anywhere from 12 to 14 billion dollars.
Scientists are entertaining all kinds of hypotheses, including the theory that a pesticide may have caused the bees' neurological damage and altered their sense of orientation. Others lay the blame on the drought and even mobile phone waves, but, what's certain is that no one knows exactly what has unleashed this syndrome.
The worst may be yet to come: a new war aimed at securing gas and oil supplies that can take humanity to the brink of total annihilation.
Invoking intelligence sources, Russian newspapers have reported that a war on Iran has been in the works for over three years now, since the day the government of the United States resolved to occupy Iraq completely, unleashing a seemingly endless and despicable civil war.
All the while, the government of the United States devotes hundreds of billions to the development of highly sophisticated technologies, as those which employ micro-electronic systems or new nuclear weapons which can strike their targets an hour following the order to attack.
The United States brazenly turns a deaf ear to world public opinion, which is against all kinds of nuclear weapons.
Razing all of Iran's factories to the ground is a relatively easy task, from the technical point of view, for a powerful country like the United States. The difficult task may come later, if a new war were to be unleashed against another Muslim faith which deserves our utmost respect, as do all other religions of the Near, Middle or Far East, predating or postdating Christianity.
The arrest of English soldiers at Iran's territorial waters recalls the nearly identical act of provocation of the so-called "Brothers to the Rescue" who, ignoring President Clinton's orders advanced over our country's territorial waters. Cuba's absolutely legitimate and defensive action gave the United States a pretext to promulgate the well-known Helms-Burton Act, which encroaches upon the sovereignty of other nations besides Cuba. The powerful media have consigned that episode to oblivion. No few people attribute the price of oil, at nearly 70 dollars a gallon as of Monday, to fears of a possible invasion of Iran.
Where shall poor Third World countries find the basic resources needed to survive?
I am not exaggerating or using overblown language. I am confining myself to the facts.
As can be seen, the polyhedron has many dark faces.
April 7 / 8, 2007
And Other Reflections on the Internationalization of Genocide
Where Have All the Bees Gone?
By FIDEL CASTRO
The Camp David meeting has just come to an end. All of us followed the press conference offered by the presidents of the United States and Brazil attentively, as we did the news surrounding the meeting and the opinions voiced in this connection.
Faced with demands related to customs duties and subsidies which protect and support US ethanol production, Bush did not make the slightest concession to his Brazilian guest at Camp David.
President Lula attributed to this the rise in corn prices, which, according to his own statements, had gone up more than 85 percent.
Before these statements were made, the Washington Post had published an article by the Brazilian leader which expounded on the idea of transforming food into fuel.
It is not my intention to hurt Brazil or to meddle in the internal affairs of this great country. It was in effect in Rio de Janeiro, host of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, exactly 15 years ago, where I delivered a 7-minute speech vehemently denouncing the environmental dangers that menaced our species' survival. Bush Sr., then President of the United States, was present at that meeting and applauded my words out of courtesy; all other presidents there applauded, too.
No one at Camp David answered the fundamental question. Where are the more than 500 million tons of corn and other cereals which the United States, Europe and wealthy nations require to produce the gallons of ethanol that big companies in the United States and other countries demand in exchange for their voluminous investments going to be produced and who is going to supply them? Where are the soy, sunflower and rape seeds, whose essential oils these same, wealthy nations are to turn into fuel, going to be produced and who will produce them?
Some countries are food producers which export their surpluses. The balance of exporters and consumers had already become precarious before this and food prices had skyrocketed. In the interests of brevity, I shall limit myself to pointing out the following:
According to recent data, the five chief producers of corn, barley, sorghum, rye, millet and oats which Bush wants to transform into the raw material of ethanol production, supply the world market with 679 million tons of these products. Similarly, the five chief consumers, some of which also produce these grains, currently require 604 million annual tons of these products. The available surplus is less than 80 million tons of grain.
This colossal squandering of cereals destined to fuel production -and these estimates do not include data on oily seeds-shall serve to save rich countries less than 15 percent of the total annual consumption of their voracious automobiles.
At Camp David, Bush declared his intention of applying this formula around the world. This spells nothing other than the internationalization of genocide.
In his statements, published by the Washington Post on the eve of the Camp David meeting, the Brazilian president affirmed that less than one percent of Brazil's arable land was used to grow cane destined to ethanol production. This is nearly three times the land surface Cuba used when it produced nearly 10 million tons of sugar a year, before the crisis that befell the Soviet Union and the advent of climate changes.
Our country has been producing and exporting sugar for a longer time. First, on the basis of the work of slaves, whose numbers swelled to over 300 thousand in the first years of the 19th century and who turned the Spanish colony into the world's number one exporter. Nearly one hundred years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, when Cuba was a pseudo-republic which had been denied full independence by US interventionism, it was immigrants from the West Indies and illiterate Cubans alone who bore the burden of growing and harvesting sugarcane on the island. The scourge of our people was the off-season, inherent to the cyclical nature of the harvest. Sugarcane plantations were the property of US companies or powerful Cuban-born landowners. Cuba, thus, has more experience than anyone as regards the social impact of this crop.
This past Sunday, April 1, CNN televised the opinions of Brazilian experts who affirm that many lands destined to sugarcane have been purchased by wealthy Americans and Europeans.
As part of my reflections on the subject, published on March 29, I expounded on the impact climate change has had on Cuba and on other basic characteristics of our country's climate which contribute to this.
On our poor and anything but consumerist island, one would be unable to find enough workers to endure the rigors of the harvest and to care for the sugarcane plantations in the ever more intense heat, rains or droughts. When hurricanes lash the island, not even the best machines can harvest the bent-over and twisted canes. For centuries, the practice of burning sugarcane was unknown and no soil was compacted under the weight of complex machines and enormous trucks. Nitrogen, potassium and phosphate fertilizers, today extremely expensive, did not yet even exist, and the dry and wet months succeeded each other regularly. In modern agriculture, no high yields are possible without crop rotation methods.
On Sunday, April 1, the French Press Agency (AFP) published disquieting reports on the subject of climate change, which experts gathered by the United Nations already consider an inevitable phenomenon that will spell serious repercussions for the world in the coming decades.
According to a UN report to be approved next week in Brussels, climate change will have a significant impact on the American continent, generating more violent storms and heat waves and causing droughts, the extinction of some species and even hunger in Latin America.
The AFP report indicates that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forewarned that at the end of this century, every hemisphere will endure water-related problems and, if governments take no measures in this connection, rising temperatures could increase the risks of mortality, contamination, natural catastrophes and infectious diseases.
In Latin America, global warming is already melting glaciers in the Andes and threatening the Amazon forest, whose perimeter may slowly be turned into a savannah, the cable goes on to report.
Because a great part of its population lives near the coast, the United States is also vulnerable to extreme natural phenomena, as hurricane Katrina demonstrated in 2005.
According to AFP, this is the second of three IPCC reports which began to be published last February, following an initial scientific forecast which established the certainty of climate change.
This second 1400-page report which analyzes climate change in different sectors and regions, of which AFP has obtained a copy, considers that, even if radical measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that pollute the atmosphere are taken, the rise in temperatures around the planet in the coming decades is already unavoidable, concludes the French Press Agency.
As was to be expected, at the Camp David meeting, Dan Fisk, National Security advisor for the region, declared that "in the discussion on regional issues, [I expect] Cuba to come up () if there's anyone that knows how to create starvation, it's Fidel Castro. He also knows how not to do ethanol".
As I find myself obliged to respond to this gentleman, it is my duty to remind him that Cuba's infant mortality rate is lower than the United States'. All citizens -- this is beyond question -- enjoy free medical services. Everyone has access to education and no one is denied employment, in spite of nearly half a century of economic blockade and the attempts of US governments to starve and economically asphyxiate the people of Cuba.
China would never devote a single ton of cereals or leguminous plants to the production of ethanol, and it is an economically prosperous nation which is breaking growth records, where all citizens earn the income they need to purchase essential consumer items, despite the fact that 48 percent of its population, which exceeds 1.3 billion, works in agriculture. On the contrary, it has set out to reduce energy consumption considerably by shutting down thousands of factories which consume unacceptable amounts of electricity and hydrocarbons. It imports many of the food products mentioned above from far-off corners of the world, transporting these over thousands of miles.
Scores of countries do not produce hydrocarbons and are unable to produce corn and other grains or oily seeds, for they do not even have enough water to meet their most basic needs.
At a meeting on ethanol production held in Buenos Aires by the Argentine Oil Industry Chamber and Cereals Exporters Association, Loek Boonekamp, the Dutch head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)'s commercial and marketing division, told the press that governments are very much enthused about this process but that they should objectively consider whether ethanol ought to be given such resolute support.
According to Boonekamp, the United States is the only country where ethanol can be profitable and, without subsidies, no other country can make it viable.
According to the report, Boonekamp insists that ethanol is not manna from Heaven and that we should not blindly commit to developing this process.
Today, developed countries are pushing to have fossil fuels mixed with biofuels at around five percent and this is already affecting agricultural prices. If this figure went up to 10 percent, 30 percent of the United States' cultivated surface and 50 percent of Europe's would be required. That is the reason Boonekamp asks himself whether the process is sustainable, as an increase in the demand for crops destined to ethanol production would generate higher and less stable prices.
Protectionist measures are today at 54 cents per gallon and real subsidies reach far higher figures.
Applying the simple arithmetic we learned in high school, we could show how, by simply replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones, as I explained in my previous reflections, millions and millions of dollars in investment and energy could be saved, without the need to use a single acre of farming land.
In the meantime, we are receiving news from Washington, through the AP, reporting that the mysterious disappearance of millions of bees throughout the United States has edged beekeepers to the brink of a nervous breakdown and is even cause for concern in Congress, which will discuss this Thursday the critical situation facing this insect, essential to the agricultural sector. According to the report, the first disquieting signs of this enigma became evident shortly after Christmas in the state of Florida, when beekeepers discovered that their bees had vanished without a trace. Since then, the syndrome which experts have christened as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has reduced the country's swarms by 25 percent.
Daniel Weaver, president of the US Beekeepers Association, stated that more than half a million colonies, each with a population of nearly 50 thousand bees, had been lost. He added that the syndrome has struck 30 of the country's 50 states. What is curious about the phenomenon is that, in many cases, the mortal remains of the bees are not found.
According to a study conducted by Cornell University, these industrious insects pollinate crops valued at anywhere from 12 to 14 billion dollars.
Scientists are entertaining all kinds of hypotheses, including the theory that a pesticide may have caused the bees' neurological damage and altered their sense of orientation. Others lay the blame on the drought and even mobile phone waves, but, what's certain is that no one knows exactly what has unleashed this syndrome.
The worst may be yet to come: a new war aimed at securing gas and oil supplies that can take humanity to the brink of total annihilation.
Invoking intelligence sources, Russian newspapers have reported that a war on Iran has been in the works for over three years now, since the day the government of the United States resolved to occupy Iraq completely, unleashing a seemingly endless and despicable civil war.
All the while, the government of the United States devotes hundreds of billions to the development of highly sophisticated technologies, as those which employ micro-electronic systems or new nuclear weapons which can strike their targets an hour following the order to attack.
The United States brazenly turns a deaf ear to world public opinion, which is against all kinds of nuclear weapons.
Razing all of Iran's factories to the ground is a relatively easy task, from the technical point of view, for a powerful country like the United States. The difficult task may come later, if a new war were to be unleashed against another Muslim faith which deserves our utmost respect, as do all other religions of the Near, Middle or Far East, predating or postdating Christianity.
The arrest of English soldiers at Iran's territorial waters recalls the nearly identical act of provocation of the so-called "Brothers to the Rescue" who, ignoring President Clinton's orders advanced over our country's territorial waters. Cuba's absolutely legitimate and defensive action gave the United States a pretext to promulgate the well-known Helms-Burton Act, which encroaches upon the sovereignty of other nations besides Cuba. The powerful media have consigned that episode to oblivion. No few people attribute the price of oil, at nearly 70 dollars a gallon as of Monday, to fears of a possible invasion of Iran.
Where shall poor Third World countries find the basic resources needed to survive?
I am not exaggerating or using overblown language. I am confining myself to the facts.
As can be seen, the polyhedron has many dark faces.
Monday, April 02, 2007
If you're going to celebrate religious holidays, at least do it right!
Yes, I know, celebration of religious holidays like Easter and Christmas has been under fire for a while now. And, to that, I say, bullshit! We should just celebrate every group's holidays. More celebrating is what we need, not less. I'll celebrate the Jewish holidays, the Hindu holidays, made-up holidays... why not? It's fun, you learn about other people's cultures, there's generally food involved... what's not to like about this?
Anyway, here's the thing, I'm not religious, but I think if you're going to celebrate a religious holiday, you should do it properly.
That's why I was kind of put out when I walked into work this morning, to find the whole joint covered with baskets of chocolate, it's still Lent people! You can't crack out the chocolate until after Good Friday (remember Good Friday? It's only the holiest day of the whole Christian calendar). I know I'm hair splitting, and I suspect that a lot of the people who are getting all into this office Easter celebrating aren't Christians, so you can't really get on their case about not getting it quite right - also, complaining about it makes you seem like a religious cook - which I vehemently am not, I just like things to be done right.
The worst ever was the time we went out to the bar on Holy Thursday night (the day before Good Friday) and the bar was holding a Mardi Gras Party - I can't explain why it bothered me so much. Obviously, I wasn't really observing Lent (since I was at a bar), but it still ticked me off. If you're going to reference a religious holiday then you should do it properly. Mardi Gras is the last day before the beginning of Lent, Lent is a period of fasting and praying, so you party like crazy until midnight of Mardi Gras because it's your last chance before Lent. Good Friday is the last day of Lent and the day you kick the fasting and praying into overdrive. Easter Sunday is the day you celebrate and eat the chocolate and all that fun stuff. So throwing a Mardi Gras party (or cracking out the Easter chocolate) during Lent is just gauche.
In my defence, I'd just like to say that, it bothers me that this bothers me.
Anyway, here's the thing, I'm not religious, but I think if you're going to celebrate a religious holiday, you should do it properly.
That's why I was kind of put out when I walked into work this morning, to find the whole joint covered with baskets of chocolate, it's still Lent people! You can't crack out the chocolate until after Good Friday (remember Good Friday? It's only the holiest day of the whole Christian calendar). I know I'm hair splitting, and I suspect that a lot of the people who are getting all into this office Easter celebrating aren't Christians, so you can't really get on their case about not getting it quite right - also, complaining about it makes you seem like a religious cook - which I vehemently am not, I just like things to be done right.
The worst ever was the time we went out to the bar on Holy Thursday night (the day before Good Friday) and the bar was holding a Mardi Gras Party - I can't explain why it bothered me so much. Obviously, I wasn't really observing Lent (since I was at a bar), but it still ticked me off. If you're going to reference a religious holiday then you should do it properly. Mardi Gras is the last day before the beginning of Lent, Lent is a period of fasting and praying, so you party like crazy until midnight of Mardi Gras because it's your last chance before Lent. Good Friday is the last day of Lent and the day you kick the fasting and praying into overdrive. Easter Sunday is the day you celebrate and eat the chocolate and all that fun stuff. So throwing a Mardi Gras party (or cracking out the Easter chocolate) during Lent is just gauche.
In my defence, I'd just like to say that, it bothers me that this bothers me.
Apiarists buzzing about soaring rate of honeybee deaths
Die-offs raise chance devastating disease has migrated north from United States
JOHN PARTRIDGE
From Monday's Globe and Mail
Honeybees in southwestern Ontario have been dropping like flies this winter -- potentially threatening honey production and some of the estimated $5-billion in fruit and other crops across Canada that depend on the insects for pollination.
There also is talk in beekeeping circles of suspiciously high honeybee losses in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
However, commercial beekeepers and government officials in Ontario are not yet ready to concede that the unusually high winter mortality rate -- nearly three times the average -- may stem from the same mysterious syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) that is devastating honeybee populations in 24 U.S. states, with some losses running as high as 90 per cent.
"We don't think it has anything to do with colony collapse disorder," said Brent Halsall, president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association and proprietor of Halsall's Honey in Greeley, near Ottawa.
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"I don't know of anyone yet reporting [CCD] from Canada, but we are certainly watching it with concern," Heather Clay, the Calgary-based national co-ordinator of the Canadian Honey Council, said.
In the United States, honeybee pollination activities are estimated to add about $15-billion (U.S.) a year in value to crops, especially almonds, berries and other fruits and vegetables, and expert witnesses at a congressional committee hearing in Washington last Thursday warned that lower crop yields and higher prices could result if a way to combat CCD is not found.
"It's an absolute catastrophe in the U.S.," said Peter Kevan, a professor who specializes in bees in the department of environmental biology at Ontario's Guelph University.
Among the most northerly affected states are Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has estimated that the value of honeybee pollination in this country is more than $1-billion a year and represents 21 per cent of the value of about 26 selected crops.
Winter losses of honeybees in Ontario have averaged about 18 per cent a year over the past 10 to 15 years, according to provincial apiarist Douglas McRory of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.
However, as they start preparing their colonies for the 2007 honey and pollination season, commercial beekeepers in an area of southwestern Ontario have been reporting "exceptional" mortality levels.
"Most of them are about 50 per cent, but there's one person at about 90 per cent," Mr. McRory said when reached at his office in Guelph, west of Toronto.
"I personally don't think that we have what they're seeing in the States," Mr. McRory said. "There, they think it's the result of several things that aren't happening here."
He cited U.S. findings of the buildup of residues in honeycombs of certain chemicals used by U.S. beekeepers that have not been used as long or as widely in Canada, along with predations by so-called small hive beetles, which are not yet found in this country.
As well, U.S. beekeepers truck hundreds of thousands of colonies from state to state as particular crops require pollination. This makes for a much more intense and stressful life than most Ontario honeybees endure. "We move ours maybe once [a season], out east to pollinate blueberries, and then we bring them back," Mr. McRory said.
Instead, he and other experts are pointing to unusual weather patterns that led to reduced production of late-season honey on which the bees and their offspring live during the winter, and to the fact that frigid winter temperatures did not arrive until mid-January, the start of a critical period for bee reproduction.
The bees form clusters inside the hives to maintain the temperature at 21 degrees during most of the winter, but the lengthening of the days after Jan. 15 is a signal for them to raise this to the 35 degrees their nascent offspring or "brood" require. "Once they do that, they won't leave [the cluster] and they can literally starve to death even with honey on the sides of the hive," Mr. McRory said.
Meanwhile, Tim Wendell, president of the Saskatchewan Beekeepers Association, figures several unusually high losses that he has heard about in the province this year -- 60 per cent in one case, 80 per cent in another --may have more to do with poor management than anything else.
Still, Mr. Wendell also said he has not yet heard from a lot of other beekeepers in the province, and nobody appears willing to rule out the possibility that CCD may, in fact, have spread to Canada.
"I think it is certainly safe to say that we have suspicious losses across Canada, but at the moment, nobody is actually attributing them officially to colony collapse disorder," Prof. Kevan said yesterday. "The jury is still out."
Honeybee blight
Beekeepers in Ontario are reporting about three times the average mortality rate for honeybees. Such high winter death rates raise the possibility that a syndrome devastating bee populations in the United States and Europe, called colony collapse disorder, has moved into Canada. Canadian officials are unwilling to say the death rate is a result of CCD. They are pointing to the unusual winter weather instead. The cause of CCD, which can affect an entire beehive or colony, remains unknown.
Western honeybee
There are only seven species of honeybee, all of which produce and store liquefied sugar in the form of honey and construct colonial nests out of wax secreted by the workers in the colony. The Western honeybee is the subspecies that has been domesticated for commercial production in North America.
What's causing colony collapse?
The cause of the syndrome is not yet well understood and its existence remains disputed. Theories include environmental
change-related stresses, malnutrition, unknown pathogens, mites, pesticides, disease, or genetically modified crops.
PATHOGENS
Varroa mites prey on developing bees by infecting the chambers where larvae are developing and feeding on their blood. However, Canadian authorities do not believe they are the cause of the recent die-offs.
PESTICIDES
A number of destroyed colonies in the U.S. have been found to have build-ups of certain nicotine-based insecticides. However, these chemicals are not in wide use in Canada and are not thought to be the cause of Canadian deaths.
WEATHER
The relatively warm temperatures in January may have wreaked havoc with the bees' finely tuned breeding cycle, causing them to accelerate the development of larvae just before dangerously cold temperatures struck.
TRANSPORTATION
U.S. commercial beekeepers truck colonies between states as seasonal crops require pollination and this is known to cause considerable stress to the bees. In Canada, this practice is limited by the shorter growing season.
Four Canadian provinces have reported sudden, massive and unexplained die-offs of commercial honeybee colonies. Spokespeople for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs say they are not convinced the die-offs in Canada are happening for the same reasons they are happening in the United States and are reluctant to apply the term colony collapse disorder to the Canadian cases.
JOHN PARTRIDGE
From Monday's Globe and Mail
Honeybees in southwestern Ontario have been dropping like flies this winter -- potentially threatening honey production and some of the estimated $5-billion in fruit and other crops across Canada that depend on the insects for pollination.
There also is talk in beekeeping circles of suspiciously high honeybee losses in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
However, commercial beekeepers and government officials in Ontario are not yet ready to concede that the unusually high winter mortality rate -- nearly three times the average -- may stem from the same mysterious syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) that is devastating honeybee populations in 24 U.S. states, with some losses running as high as 90 per cent.
"We don't think it has anything to do with colony collapse disorder," said Brent Halsall, president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association and proprietor of Halsall's Honey in Greeley, near Ottawa.
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We are seriously screwing the pooch on an amazing array of human...
So we have GMO bees trying to pollinate GMO crops and we transport...
Cold Clear Water's got it right: what's whacking the honey business...
I wonder if genetically altering our food is a contributing factor...
26 reader comments | Join the conversation
"I don't know of anyone yet reporting [CCD] from Canada, but we are certainly watching it with concern," Heather Clay, the Calgary-based national co-ordinator of the Canadian Honey Council, said.
In the United States, honeybee pollination activities are estimated to add about $15-billion (U.S.) a year in value to crops, especially almonds, berries and other fruits and vegetables, and expert witnesses at a congressional committee hearing in Washington last Thursday warned that lower crop yields and higher prices could result if a way to combat CCD is not found.
"It's an absolute catastrophe in the U.S.," said Peter Kevan, a professor who specializes in bees in the department of environmental biology at Ontario's Guelph University.
Among the most northerly affected states are Michigan, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has estimated that the value of honeybee pollination in this country is more than $1-billion a year and represents 21 per cent of the value of about 26 selected crops.
Winter losses of honeybees in Ontario have averaged about 18 per cent a year over the past 10 to 15 years, according to provincial apiarist Douglas McRory of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.
However, as they start preparing their colonies for the 2007 honey and pollination season, commercial beekeepers in an area of southwestern Ontario have been reporting "exceptional" mortality levels.
"Most of them are about 50 per cent, but there's one person at about 90 per cent," Mr. McRory said when reached at his office in Guelph, west of Toronto.
"I personally don't think that we have what they're seeing in the States," Mr. McRory said. "There, they think it's the result of several things that aren't happening here."
He cited U.S. findings of the buildup of residues in honeycombs of certain chemicals used by U.S. beekeepers that have not been used as long or as widely in Canada, along with predations by so-called small hive beetles, which are not yet found in this country.
As well, U.S. beekeepers truck hundreds of thousands of colonies from state to state as particular crops require pollination. This makes for a much more intense and stressful life than most Ontario honeybees endure. "We move ours maybe once [a season], out east to pollinate blueberries, and then we bring them back," Mr. McRory said.
Instead, he and other experts are pointing to unusual weather patterns that led to reduced production of late-season honey on which the bees and their offspring live during the winter, and to the fact that frigid winter temperatures did not arrive until mid-January, the start of a critical period for bee reproduction.
The bees form clusters inside the hives to maintain the temperature at 21 degrees during most of the winter, but the lengthening of the days after Jan. 15 is a signal for them to raise this to the 35 degrees their nascent offspring or "brood" require. "Once they do that, they won't leave [the cluster] and they can literally starve to death even with honey on the sides of the hive," Mr. McRory said.
Meanwhile, Tim Wendell, president of the Saskatchewan Beekeepers Association, figures several unusually high losses that he has heard about in the province this year -- 60 per cent in one case, 80 per cent in another --may have more to do with poor management than anything else.
Still, Mr. Wendell also said he has not yet heard from a lot of other beekeepers in the province, and nobody appears willing to rule out the possibility that CCD may, in fact, have spread to Canada.
"I think it is certainly safe to say that we have suspicious losses across Canada, but at the moment, nobody is actually attributing them officially to colony collapse disorder," Prof. Kevan said yesterday. "The jury is still out."
Honeybee blight
Beekeepers in Ontario are reporting about three times the average mortality rate for honeybees. Such high winter death rates raise the possibility that a syndrome devastating bee populations in the United States and Europe, called colony collapse disorder, has moved into Canada. Canadian officials are unwilling to say the death rate is a result of CCD. They are pointing to the unusual winter weather instead. The cause of CCD, which can affect an entire beehive or colony, remains unknown.
Western honeybee
There are only seven species of honeybee, all of which produce and store liquefied sugar in the form of honey and construct colonial nests out of wax secreted by the workers in the colony. The Western honeybee is the subspecies that has been domesticated for commercial production in North America.
What's causing colony collapse?
The cause of the syndrome is not yet well understood and its existence remains disputed. Theories include environmental
change-related stresses, malnutrition, unknown pathogens, mites, pesticides, disease, or genetically modified crops.
PATHOGENS
Varroa mites prey on developing bees by infecting the chambers where larvae are developing and feeding on their blood. However, Canadian authorities do not believe they are the cause of the recent die-offs.
PESTICIDES
A number of destroyed colonies in the U.S. have been found to have build-ups of certain nicotine-based insecticides. However, these chemicals are not in wide use in Canada and are not thought to be the cause of Canadian deaths.
WEATHER
The relatively warm temperatures in January may have wreaked havoc with the bees' finely tuned breeding cycle, causing them to accelerate the development of larvae just before dangerously cold temperatures struck.
TRANSPORTATION
U.S. commercial beekeepers truck colonies between states as seasonal crops require pollination and this is known to cause considerable stress to the bees. In Canada, this practice is limited by the shorter growing season.
Four Canadian provinces have reported sudden, massive and unexplained die-offs of commercial honeybee colonies. Spokespeople for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs say they are not convinced the die-offs in Canada are happening for the same reasons they are happening in the United States and are reluctant to apply the term colony collapse disorder to the Canadian cases.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
It's very hard to raise a baby polar bear
BERLIN (Reuters) - Berlin Zoo rallied to the defense of Knut, a three-month-old polar bear cub, Tuesday, rejecting demands that the animal be allowed to die after being abandoned by its mother.The fate of "cuddly Knut" has gripped the German capital since his birth in December. Rejected by his mother Tosca, the cub was adopted by a zookeeper who moved into the animal's enclosure to care for him round the clock.
Some animal rights campaigners think this will humanize the bear too much and want the zoo to stop saving young animals.
"Hand-rearing a polar bear is not appropriate and is a serious violation of animal rights," Bild newspaper quoted animal rights campaigner Frank Albrecht as saying.
In fact, the cub should have been killed," he added.
Berlin Zoo said the animal would not be put down or left to fend for itself: "That's complete nonsense," a spokesman said.
Knut has become an unofficial Berlin city mascot and has even had his picture taken by photographer Annie Leibovitz as part of a new climate change campaign.
Knut's mother Tosca -- formerly a performing animal in an East German zoo -- rejected Knut and his twin brother shortly after their birth. The twin died but Knut was "adopted" by zookeeper Thomas Doerflein.
The polar bear is bottle-fed, washed and cuddled by his adoptive father, who moved in to the zoo to sleep in a bed by the bears crate. Newspapers report that Doerflein also plays him Elvis songs on the guitar and gave him Christmas presents.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Subway users to see ghost station
I'm soooo excited! The GF told me about this station years ago, and I've always wondered about it. Too bad I'm going to be away this weekend so I won't get first crack at seeing it. But next weekend, I'll be there with bells on! Now all they have to do it start showing us the other ones.
Feb 23, 2007 08:34 AM
thestar.com staff
TTC tunnel repairs will change train service on the Bloor-Danforth line this weekend - and riders will get a chance for a quick peak at an abandoned station.
Construction on the tunnel will close Bay Station on the weekends for the next six weeks, TTC officials say on their website. TTC officials recommend those who normally use Bay station to board at Yonge and Bloor instead.
Trains on the Bloor-Danforth line will bypass the Bay station and run on a rarely-used track through an unused TTC station below the Bay station. Trains won’t be stopping at the abandoned station.
Called Yorkville, the "ghost" station is rented out for movie shoots and to train TTC subway drivers.
Regular Bloor-Danforth service will resume in April.
Friday, February 17, 2006
Currency Challenge
Here's a fun challenge for all of you folks out there with too much time on their hands... A friend of mine got this as a tip at work, and can't figure out what currency it is. I've had several guesses already, but I'm putting it out there to everyone. Does anyone recognize this bill?
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Indonesia's Lost World
Expedition discovers dozens of exotic new species of frogs, butterflies and palms in southern Papua
Remote mist-shrouded jungle called `as close to the Garden of Eden as you're going to find on Earth'
Feb. 8, 2006. 05:36 AM
ROBIN MCDOWELL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
JAKARTA—Soon after scientists landed by helicopter in the mist-shrouded mountains of one of Indonesia's most remote provinces, they stumbled on a primitive egg-laying mammal that simply allowed itself to be picked up and brought to their field camp.
Describing a "Lost World" — apparently never visited by humans — members of the team said yesterday they also saw large mammals that have been hunted to near-extinction elsewhere and discovered dozens of exotic new species of frogs, butterflies and palms.
"We've only scratched the surface," said Bruce Beehler, a co-leader of the month-long trip to the Foja Mountains, an area in the eastern province of Papua with roughly 500,000 hectares of pristine tropical forest.
"There was not a single trail, no sign of civilization, no sign of even local communities ever having been there," he said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.
"It is as close to the Garden of Eden as you're going to find on Earth," said Beehler.
Two headmen from the Kwerba and Papasena tribes, the customary landowners of the mountain range, accompanied the expedition, and "they were as astounded as we were at how isolated it was,'' he said.
"As far as they knew, neither of their clans had ever been to the area.''
The December expedition was organized by U.S.-based Conservation International and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, and funded by the National Geographic Society and several other organizations.
Minutes after the small team of American, Indonesian and Australian scientists were dropped into a boggy lake bed and set up camp near the mountain range's western summit, they said they encountered a new species of bird — a red-faced and wattled honeyeater.
The next day they saw Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise, described by hunters in the 19th century and named for the feathers that extend from its head in place of a crest.
They watched in amazement as a male bird performed a courtship dance for a female, and later took the first known photograph of the bird.
The scientists said they discovered 20 frog species — including a microhylid frog less than 1.2 centimetres long — four new butterfly species, and at least five new types of palms.
Among their most memorable experiences were their encounters with the long-beaked echidna, members of a primitive egg-laying group of mammals called monotremes, which twice allowed themselves to be picked up and brought to the scientists' camp for observation.
Beehler attributed the lack of fear displayed by the long-snouted spine-covered echidnas to the fact that they probably had never come into contact with humans.
But other animals, like the golden-mantled tree kangaroo, an arboreal jungle-dweller previously thought to have been hunted to near-extinction, were much more shy, he said, and quickly disappeared into the dense forest after being spotted.
Though the scientists' findings will have to be published in scientific journals and reviewed by peers before being officially classified as new species, other environmentalists said the discoveries were hardly surprising in a country renowned for its rich biodiversity.
"There are many species that have not been identified" in Indonesia, said Chairul Saleh of the World Wildlife Fund, which has made hundreds of its own discoveries in the sprawling archipelago in the last 10 years.
Papua, the scene of a decades-long separatist rebellion that has killed an estimated 100,000 people, is one of Indonesia's most remote regions geographically and politically, and access by foreigners is tightly restricted.
The scientists said they needed six permits before they could legally visit the mountains located on the western side of New Guinea island. The island is split between the Indonesian west and Papua New Guinea in the east.
Stephen Richards of the South Australia Museum in Adelaide said he and other team members got a glimpse of what the island "was like 50,000 years ago, because there's been no hunting, no impact of transport or anything like that.''
Because of the rich diversity in the forest, the group rarely had time to stray more than a few miles from their base camp.
Beehler, vice president of Conservation International's Melanesia Center for Biodiversity Conservation, said he hopes to return this year with other scientists. One of the reasons for the rain forest's isolation, he said, was that only a few hundred people live in the region and game in the mountain's foothills is so abundant they have no reason to venture into the jungle's interior.
There did not appear to be any immediate conservation threat to the area, which has the status of a wildlife sanctuary, he said.
"No logging permits are given to this area, there is no transport system — not a single road," Beehler said.
"But clearly, with time, everything is a threat. In the next few decades there will be strong demands, especially if you think of the timber needs of nearby countries like China and Japan. They will be very hungry for logs.''
Remote mist-shrouded jungle called `as close to the Garden of Eden as you're going to find on Earth'
Feb. 8, 2006. 05:36 AM
ROBIN MCDOWELL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
JAKARTA—Soon after scientists landed by helicopter in the mist-shrouded mountains of one of Indonesia's most remote provinces, they stumbled on a primitive egg-laying mammal that simply allowed itself to be picked up and brought to their field camp.
Describing a "Lost World" — apparently never visited by humans — members of the team said yesterday they also saw large mammals that have been hunted to near-extinction elsewhere and discovered dozens of exotic new species of frogs, butterflies and palms.
"We've only scratched the surface," said Bruce Beehler, a co-leader of the month-long trip to the Foja Mountains, an area in the eastern province of Papua with roughly 500,000 hectares of pristine tropical forest.
"There was not a single trail, no sign of civilization, no sign of even local communities ever having been there," he said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.
"It is as close to the Garden of Eden as you're going to find on Earth," said Beehler.
Two headmen from the Kwerba and Papasena tribes, the customary landowners of the mountain range, accompanied the expedition, and "they were as astounded as we were at how isolated it was,'' he said.
"As far as they knew, neither of their clans had ever been to the area.''
The December expedition was organized by U.S.-based Conservation International and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, and funded by the National Geographic Society and several other organizations.
Minutes after the small team of American, Indonesian and Australian scientists were dropped into a boggy lake bed and set up camp near the mountain range's western summit, they said they encountered a new species of bird — a red-faced and wattled honeyeater.
The next day they saw Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise, described by hunters in the 19th century and named for the feathers that extend from its head in place of a crest.
They watched in amazement as a male bird performed a courtship dance for a female, and later took the first known photograph of the bird.
The scientists said they discovered 20 frog species — including a microhylid frog less than 1.2 centimetres long — four new butterfly species, and at least five new types of palms.
Among their most memorable experiences were their encounters with the long-beaked echidna, members of a primitive egg-laying group of mammals called monotremes, which twice allowed themselves to be picked up and brought to the scientists' camp for observation.
Beehler attributed the lack of fear displayed by the long-snouted spine-covered echidnas to the fact that they probably had never come into contact with humans.
But other animals, like the golden-mantled tree kangaroo, an arboreal jungle-dweller previously thought to have been hunted to near-extinction, were much more shy, he said, and quickly disappeared into the dense forest after being spotted.
Though the scientists' findings will have to be published in scientific journals and reviewed by peers before being officially classified as new species, other environmentalists said the discoveries were hardly surprising in a country renowned for its rich biodiversity.
"There are many species that have not been identified" in Indonesia, said Chairul Saleh of the World Wildlife Fund, which has made hundreds of its own discoveries in the sprawling archipelago in the last 10 years.
Papua, the scene of a decades-long separatist rebellion that has killed an estimated 100,000 people, is one of Indonesia's most remote regions geographically and politically, and access by foreigners is tightly restricted.
The scientists said they needed six permits before they could legally visit the mountains located on the western side of New Guinea island. The island is split between the Indonesian west and Papua New Guinea in the east.
Stephen Richards of the South Australia Museum in Adelaide said he and other team members got a glimpse of what the island "was like 50,000 years ago, because there's been no hunting, no impact of transport or anything like that.''
Because of the rich diversity in the forest, the group rarely had time to stray more than a few miles from their base camp.
Beehler, vice president of Conservation International's Melanesia Center for Biodiversity Conservation, said he hopes to return this year with other scientists. One of the reasons for the rain forest's isolation, he said, was that only a few hundred people live in the region and game in the mountain's foothills is so abundant they have no reason to venture into the jungle's interior.
There did not appear to be any immediate conservation threat to the area, which has the status of a wildlife sanctuary, he said.
"No logging permits are given to this area, there is no transport system — not a single road," Beehler said.
"But clearly, with time, everything is a threat. In the next few decades there will be strong demands, especially if you think of the timber needs of nearby countries like China and Japan. They will be very hungry for logs.''
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Don't drink and fly
Booze and flying didn't mix for Austrian songbirds
Last Updated Thu, 02 Feb 2006 15:13:44 EST
CBC News
Alcohol, not avian flu, contributed to the deaths of 40 songbirds in Vienna last month, Austrian veterinarians have found.
Experts initially feared the birds were killed by bird flu. However, tests showed their livers were damaged from intoxication. They were all been found with their necks broken after flying into windows across the city.
The livers of the birds resembled those of "chronic alcoholics," Sonja Wehsely, a spokeswoman for Vienna's veterinary authority, told Austrian television on Thursday.
The birds apparently got tipsy gorging on fermented berries.
Alcohol from the rotting berries may have caused the birds to become disoriented and fly into the windows, she said.
* FROM OCT. 9, 1999: Scarecrows move to the city to aid bird migration
It's estimated 100 million birds die each year across North America after crashing into glass office buildings.
Last Updated Thu, 02 Feb 2006 15:13:44 EST
CBC News
Alcohol, not avian flu, contributed to the deaths of 40 songbirds in Vienna last month, Austrian veterinarians have found.
Experts initially feared the birds were killed by bird flu. However, tests showed their livers were damaged from intoxication. They were all been found with their necks broken after flying into windows across the city.
The livers of the birds resembled those of "chronic alcoholics," Sonja Wehsely, a spokeswoman for Vienna's veterinary authority, told Austrian television on Thursday.
The birds apparently got tipsy gorging on fermented berries.
Alcohol from the rotting berries may have caused the birds to become disoriented and fly into the windows, she said.
* FROM OCT. 9, 1999: Scarecrows move to the city to aid bird migration
It's estimated 100 million birds die each year across North America after crashing into glass office buildings.
Snowy Owl
Far from home, snowy owl draws crowd in Virginia
Last Updated Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:11:24 EST
CBC News
A lone visitor from Canada is causing a stir on the grounds of Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C.
The focus of all the excitement: an adult snowy owl, white from tip to toe and never before reported in these parts.
Snowy Owl (CP file photo).
The ghost-like arrival, normally a resident of the Arctic, has drawn hundreds of people to the airport, some toting high-powered cameras and digital scopes as they peer across the runways and down from atop a parking garage.
CBC Washington correspondent Michael Colton describes the late-afternoon scene:
A cold wind whips across the garage as Virginia birders wait for a once-in-a- lifetime sighting. They shiver as they wait, and then, just before sunset, the bird appears.
"I see him! Yoo-hoo!" a woman cries.
"Fly! Be free! Fly," says another.
But the owl prefers to sit still in the tall grass. –: just like a snowball, someone says – until the dark steals over it.
Last Updated Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:11:24 EST
CBC News
A lone visitor from Canada is causing a stir on the grounds of Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C.
The focus of all the excitement: an adult snowy owl, white from tip to toe and never before reported in these parts.
Snowy Owl (CP file photo).
The ghost-like arrival, normally a resident of the Arctic, has drawn hundreds of people to the airport, some toting high-powered cameras and digital scopes as they peer across the runways and down from atop a parking garage.
CBC Washington correspondent Michael Colton describes the late-afternoon scene:
A cold wind whips across the garage as Virginia birders wait for a once-in-a- lifetime sighting. They shiver as they wait, and then, just before sunset, the bird appears.
"I see him! Yoo-hoo!" a woman cries.
"Fly! Be free! Fly," says another.
But the owl prefers to sit still in the tall grass. –: just like a snowball, someone says – until the dark steals over it.
Monday, February 06, 2006
Oetzi
For PP, Oetzi's biggest fan
Iceman may have been infertile outcast
Last Updated Fri, 03 Feb 2006 18:12:25 EST
CBC News
A 5,200-year-old man found frozen in a glacier may have been an infertile outcast, a new study suggests.
The mummy, known as Oetzi, was found in the Alps between Italy and Austria in 1991.
Scientist examines Oetzi (AP file photo)
Researchers have now studied samples of DNA taken from his intestines. They say it shows two mutations typically found in men with reduced sperm function, which often leads to sterility.
"The possibility that he was unable to father offspring cannot be eliminated," said the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in the Alpine town of Bolzano, Italy.
"This not improbable hypothesis raises new questions concerning his social rank within his society," the museum, which stores the iceman, added in a statement.
Italian anthropologist Franco Rollo determined Oetzi's DNA likely hails from central Europe. Specifically, he appears to be a Ladine, an ethnic group that still lives in the region.
FROM OCT. 30, 2003: Iceman stuck close to home: study
Previous studies showed an arrowhead in the body's left shoulder blade, and blood from four different people was found on his clothes. The findings have led some to speculate he came to a violent end.
Oetzi also had cuts on his hands. He was wearing three layers of clothes made from goat, deerskin and bark.
Medicine in his pockets and the weapons he was carrying suggest he may have had a higher status, but others say he was a social outcast.
Rollo's paper will be published in February's edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Iceman may have been infertile outcast
Last Updated Fri, 03 Feb 2006 18:12:25 EST
CBC News
A 5,200-year-old man found frozen in a glacier may have been an infertile outcast, a new study suggests.
The mummy, known as Oetzi, was found in the Alps between Italy and Austria in 1991.
Scientist examines Oetzi (AP file photo)
Researchers have now studied samples of DNA taken from his intestines. They say it shows two mutations typically found in men with reduced sperm function, which often leads to sterility.
"The possibility that he was unable to father offspring cannot be eliminated," said the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in the Alpine town of Bolzano, Italy.
"This not improbable hypothesis raises new questions concerning his social rank within his society," the museum, which stores the iceman, added in a statement.
Italian anthropologist Franco Rollo determined Oetzi's DNA likely hails from central Europe. Specifically, he appears to be a Ladine, an ethnic group that still lives in the region.
FROM OCT. 30, 2003: Iceman stuck close to home: study
Previous studies showed an arrowhead in the body's left shoulder blade, and blood from four different people was found on his clothes. The findings have led some to speculate he came to a violent end.
Oetzi also had cuts on his hands. He was wearing three layers of clothes made from goat, deerskin and bark.
Medicine in his pockets and the weapons he was carrying suggest he may have had a higher status, but others say he was a social outcast.
Rollo's paper will be published in February's edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Happy Groundhog Day!
Welcome news on winter
Thursday, February 2, 2006 Posted at 8:40 AM EST
Canadian Press
Wiarton Willie, Canada's best-known four-legged forecaster, is predicting an early end to a winter many Canadians are still waiting to see.
The pudgy white woodchuck failed to see his shadow on Groundhog Day in the central Ontario town.
Shubenacadie Sam, Nova Scotia's most famous weather-forecasting rodent, also predicted an early spring.
But a unanimous groundhog verdict was prevented when Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania saw his shadow.
According to folklore, if a groundhog sees his shadow on Feb. 2, the frightened critter will flee to his burrow, heralding six more weeks of winter. If he does not see his shadow, there will be an early spring.
The tradition probably has something to do with Feb. 2 landing midway between the beginning of winter and the beginning of spring.
Some say it started with Candlemas, a Christian custom named for the lighting candles during the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary.
According to an old Scottish couplet: “If Candlemas Day is bright and clear, there'll be two winters in the year.”
In Europe, the custom was to watch for hedgehogs emerging to catch insects, but when Europeans settled in North America, the lack of hedgehogs forced them to find a substitute.
Enter the groundhog.
In 1887, German settlers in Punxsutawney, Penn., headed to Gobbler's Knob on Feb. 2 for their first, official Groundhog Day at that site. Three years ago, 40,000 people attended the event.
This year, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, but it was hard to find a complainer in the crowd out in morning temperatures well above freezing with a predicted high for the day of 9 degrees.
There were a few boos at the groundhog's prediction of six more weeks of winter, but most of the hundreds of revelers instead turned the event into an impromptu Pittsburgh Steelers rally.
Dozens of communities across North America have come up with their own weather-predicting critters, including Wiarton Willie in Ontario and Balzac Billie in Alberta.
Thursday, February 2, 2006 Posted at 8:40 AM EST
Canadian Press
Wiarton Willie, Canada's best-known four-legged forecaster, is predicting an early end to a winter many Canadians are still waiting to see.
The pudgy white woodchuck failed to see his shadow on Groundhog Day in the central Ontario town.
Shubenacadie Sam, Nova Scotia's most famous weather-forecasting rodent, also predicted an early spring.
But a unanimous groundhog verdict was prevented when Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania saw his shadow.
According to folklore, if a groundhog sees his shadow on Feb. 2, the frightened critter will flee to his burrow, heralding six more weeks of winter. If he does not see his shadow, there will be an early spring.
The tradition probably has something to do with Feb. 2 landing midway between the beginning of winter and the beginning of spring.
Some say it started with Candlemas, a Christian custom named for the lighting candles during the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary.
According to an old Scottish couplet: “If Candlemas Day is bright and clear, there'll be two winters in the year.”
In Europe, the custom was to watch for hedgehogs emerging to catch insects, but when Europeans settled in North America, the lack of hedgehogs forced them to find a substitute.
Enter the groundhog.
In 1887, German settlers in Punxsutawney, Penn., headed to Gobbler's Knob on Feb. 2 for their first, official Groundhog Day at that site. Three years ago, 40,000 people attended the event.
This year, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, but it was hard to find a complainer in the crowd out in morning temperatures well above freezing with a predicted high for the day of 9 degrees.
There were a few boos at the groundhog's prediction of six more weeks of winter, but most of the hundreds of revelers instead turned the event into an impromptu Pittsburgh Steelers rally.
Dozens of communities across North America have come up with their own weather-predicting critters, including Wiarton Willie in Ontario and Balzac Billie in Alberta.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
New protein may relieve depression, scientists say
if this P11 drug will be any better tested then the Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac bunch were. Jesus.
A new protein may play a key role in helping to treat depression, say scientists studying the illness.
Serotonin is a mood-regulating chemical that allows nerve cells in the brain to communicate with each other.
Most antidepressants work by boosting levels of serotonin in the brain.
But scientists don't know what causes depression or exactly how serotonin works. Swedish, American and French researchers designed laboratory experiments to try and unravel the mystery.
The team, led by Nobel laureate and neuroscientist Paul Greengard, discovered that the new p11 protein increases the number of places serotonin can bind to on the surface of brain cells.
Lab rodents bred to have a depression-like illness showed lower levels of the protein, the researchers reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science. The depressed mice were not as mobile and less responsive.
Rats and mice given two older classes of antidepressants and shock therapy showed higher levels of the protein compared to control animals.
The three treatments work in different ways but all caused the same biochemical change, adding to the evidence that p11 is linked to the therapeutic benefits of antidepressant drugs, Greengard said.
"Overall, this finding represents compelling evidence that p11 has a pivotal role in both the cause of depression and perhaps its successful treatment," wrote Trevor Sharp, a pharmacologist at Oxford University in a journal commentary.
The findings won't immediately lead to new drug treatments but could offer future targets, said Per Svenningsson, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
The research was sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Swedish Research Council. One of the study's authors works for the pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly.
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