Are bees in peril or not? It's difficult to know, because the moment science declares one thing not an issue (example: neonicotinoid targeted pesticides), environmental groups move the goalposts and declare something else is the problem. When honey bees were shown to be unaffected, groups proposed that wild bees were the big concern, and if amateur record-keeping and a Bayesian estimate agrees,...
read moreThe Bee Informed Partnership conducts an annual survey of commercial and backyard beekeepers so that they can try and track health and survival rates of honey bee colonies. Though honey bees are just one bee species out of about 27,000, estimates of their implied economic value are around $10 billion annually. A The latest results show that honey bee colonies declined 44 percent...
read moreIn 2006 there was a serious decline in the number of honey bee colonies in parts of Europe and the United States and it brought renewed concern about another Colony Collapse Disorder, which had last occurred in the mid-1990s. read...
read moreI like to use the Sneetches With Stars analogy (I did so again two days ago) because Theodor Seuss Geisel, famously known as Dr. Seuss, was spot on with the idea that humans would find a reason to be different from one another. In the Sneetch community, when one group had a star, they were superior, and eventually a savvy businessman came along and found a way to give everyone stars (which was...
read moreEnjoy Greek yogurt?Maybe, if you hate nature. Because it is now a $2 billion a year industry, activists have turned on it, a fate that the $29 billion organic food industry has so far escaped. One Green Planet says the greek yogurt manufacturing process is "creating an ecological nightmare beyond all comprehension" which tells you that no one at One Green Planet can do simple math. And they...
read moreThe Rhynchohyalus natalensis in a recent paper was caught about 1000 meters under the Tasman Sea and it has two pairs of eyes, allowing it to spot danger from every angle. One pair is upward-facing tubular eyes, to spot danger from above, while another set is on the side of its head, to detect bioluminescence from deep sea creatures. The second type of eye is typically associated with...
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