fourty-two for tea too

jephjacques:

Happy Friday! Have a rad new Deathmøle track.

leftish:

[NOTE* from Leftish: I wish I knew how I could get MORE people to CARE about this VERY SERIOUS ISSUE.  WE ARE LOSING THE BEES!!  What will happen to POOH BEAR if we LOSE all the BEES???]

As a growing body of research points to a link between colony collapse disorder and the class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, a backyard gardener in Virginia has taken to the Internet in a grassroots effort to have Bayer’s neonicotinoid pesticides taken off the market.

Susan Mariner, who grew up working the garden with her father and grandmother, says the value of pollinators was impressed upon her from an early age.

“My grandmother taught me that bees are ‘our partners in the garden,’” she remembers.

Today, Mariner has her own suburban backyard garden, where she and her children grow edible crops, as well as what she calls a “Honey bee haven”: a section planted with colorful wildflowers and other plants that attract native pollinators. In the past several years, she says, her favorite winged visitors have made fewer appearances in the garden.

“I started watching bees as a young child in my father’s and my grandmother’s gardens and apple trees, which were awash in Honey bees when in bloom,” she says. “These days, when my children and I spend all day outside surrounded by thousands of blooms in our garden, we are thrilled to see a single Honey bee visit.”

Mariner says the decrease in pollinators has changed the way she and her neighbors garden. “Because there are so few pollinators, in recent years we have been forced to hand-pollinate many of our plants, something which would have been unthinkable to my grandmother. Many of my gardening neighbors have stopped growing plants that require insect pollination altogether.”

Increasingly, however, researchers are finding that the activities of Mariner’s other neighbors—those who are, in her words, “unwittingly coating their properties in neonicotinoids to achieve a picture-perfect lawn”—may be contributing to a dearth of pollinators.

Mariner used Change.org, a free petition-hosting website that harnesses social media in the name of activism, to launch a petition calling for the Environmental Protection Agency to ban Bayer’s neonicotinoid-based products. With each signature, Change.org sends an email to the person or persons targeted by the petition—in this case, three key EPA administrators. Mariner’s petition garnered a massive response, boasting over 138,000 signatures as of April 26, 2012.

Mariner says she’s thrilled with the reception her petition has received. “I’ve been extremely encouraged to see that once people learn that one-third of our food is pollinated by bees and that bees are in crisis, they are anxious to help and automatically begin spreading the word to others.”

Within days of Mariner’s petition going live, a team from the Harvard School of Public Health reported that they’d gathered still more evidence of an imidacloprid-CCD link. Over 23 weeks beginning in summer 2010, the researchers monitored bees in four different yards in Worcester County, Mass. Each yard had four bee hives treated with varying levels of imidacloprid, as well as one control bee hive. After 12 weeks of dosing, all the bees were alive, but after 23 weeks, 15 of the 16 treated bee hives had died off, with the highest-dose bee hives perishing first. The Harvard study will appear in June’s Bulletin of Insectology.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE…

This is mildly interesting. I like the picture of the nursing mother.