I just learned a bunch about honey bees! Which happens to be very fitting because "Melissa" means "honey bee" in Greek and I am in Greece. I just read "Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis" by Rowan Jacobsen. Its an amazing book! Ryan and I read two chapters out loud to each other each night.
It is very well-written, well-researched, hilarious, and is definitely of interest to readers of Michael Pollan, and Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal Vegetable Miracle; readers concerned about the relationship between and the health of their food and the environment. I love those books, but this topic of bees is different; instead of pointing fingers at corporations or the government about up and coming food crisis, the problem is here: the bees are dying. It doesn't matter whose fault it is because it is happening now, and on a more optimistic note, we have been doing lots of research on bees (since we have not realized till now how valuable they are and what we have been doing to them). For example, only within the last five years we have discovered that the cell size of the honeycomb in a hive has lots to do with the hive's ability to combat varroa mites, a huge killer of honey bees. This is important because the beekeeping industry has frames with a standardized size of cell. Without the standardized frames, bees make different sizes.
From this book, I learned about pests and diseases that afflict bees, different breeds of bees and types of pollinators, medicinal benefits of real honey (not the stuff in little plastic bears), collony collapse disorder and its relationship with pesticides and other bee diseases, types of flowers that attract different pollinators. The latter will be helpful someday when I start my own permaculture garden. For example, tomatoes are a New World fruit, not having evolved with honeybees (which came over with the Europeans). Honeybees have no idea how to extract the pollen, which has a trick to it. Bumble bees are native and know that they must shake the flower to a certain frequency before the pollen will shoot out of the flower. So now I know that my honey bees will be no good for my flowers, but will attract bumbles.
I also learned about Russian honey bees, which are not good for commercial bee keepers because of certain traits, but they are highly resilient bees. The guy who brought them over to the U.S. had a different approach to bee keeping: he said that mites and diseases ought not be an enemy; instead they are helpful signals to the keeper that you have weak bees and need to be stronger. Treating hives with chemicals to treat mites and other pests only breeds super pests and keeps the bees weak.
We were eating gyros and a guy was talking about psoriasis, which is a skin disease (that he has). He said that he gets outbreaks whenever he is stressed and that he could get a strong steroid to treat it. But what does that do? It doesn't make him less stressed. He said that instead, he must address his stress and it will go away.
An interesting approach to health and one that seems to make a lot more sense than antibiotics and cold medicine when you have a cold.
I am still scared of bees, but I will have bees someday.
It is very well-written, well-researched, hilarious, and is definitely of interest to readers of Michael Pollan, and Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal Vegetable Miracle; readers concerned about the relationship between and the health of their food and the environment. I love those books, but this topic of bees is different; instead of pointing fingers at corporations or the government about up and coming food crisis, the problem is here: the bees are dying. It doesn't matter whose fault it is because it is happening now, and on a more optimistic note, we have been doing lots of research on bees (since we have not realized till now how valuable they are and what we have been doing to them). For example, only within the last five years we have discovered that the cell size of the honeycomb in a hive has lots to do with the hive's ability to combat varroa mites, a huge killer of honey bees. This is important because the beekeeping industry has frames with a standardized size of cell. Without the standardized frames, bees make different sizes.
From this book, I learned about pests and diseases that afflict bees, different breeds of bees and types of pollinators, medicinal benefits of real honey (not the stuff in little plastic bears), collony collapse disorder and its relationship with pesticides and other bee diseases, types of flowers that attract different pollinators. The latter will be helpful someday when I start my own permaculture garden. For example, tomatoes are a New World fruit, not having evolved with honeybees (which came over with the Europeans). Honeybees have no idea how to extract the pollen, which has a trick to it. Bumble bees are native and know that they must shake the flower to a certain frequency before the pollen will shoot out of the flower. So now I know that my honey bees will be no good for my flowers, but will attract bumbles.
I also learned about Russian honey bees, which are not good for commercial bee keepers because of certain traits, but they are highly resilient bees. The guy who brought them over to the U.S. had a different approach to bee keeping: he said that mites and diseases ought not be an enemy; instead they are helpful signals to the keeper that you have weak bees and need to be stronger. Treating hives with chemicals to treat mites and other pests only breeds super pests and keeps the bees weak.
We were eating gyros and a guy was talking about psoriasis, which is a skin disease (that he has). He said that he gets outbreaks whenever he is stressed and that he could get a strong steroid to treat it. But what does that do? It doesn't make him less stressed. He said that instead, he must address his stress and it will go away.
An interesting approach to health and one that seems to make a lot more sense than antibiotics and cold medicine when you have a cold.
I am still scared of bees, but I will have bees someday.
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