What can I say, I really am a nerd! All the gardening and beekeeping are just there to keep the tech guy in check. It got away from me lately. It all started when I ran into my old "Electroluminescent Receiver," a four band ham kit radio I found on the internet that I built [...]
An August Bee Beard
Healthy hives grow a bee beard now and then. The recent spate of hot weather, and the fact that the bees just lost their honey super, meant that the best place to spend the evening was on the porch. This hive has been a productive wonder so far this year. It started out in April [...]
Blog post gets Published!
What started out as a bit of curiosity about the time-dependent toxicity of insecticides led to a blog piece I did a little over a year ago titled Time-dependent Toxicity of Imidacloprid in Bees and Ants. I thought my results were interesting enough to get a comment from other scientists that were looking at the time-dependent [...]
Bumblebee Kill in Eugene Rains on Pollinator Week
[Updated 6/19/14] It is with dismay that I must report on another bumblebee kill, this time only about a mile away from the bees in my yard. All of the details are not in yet, but the basic picture is clear. Insecticide was sprayed early Monday morning, 6/16, on blooming linden trees in an apartment [...]
The Mechanisms of Neuro-toxic Pesticides
Agricultural pesticides have become part of the chemical landscape that we all live in. To be able to make intelligent decision about the use and regulation of these chemicals, it's important to understand how they work. Almost all modern pesticides are chemicals that interfere in some way with the nervous system. The characteristics of the [...]
The Uke Case Music Stand
For the last few years, playing music and singing with others has become an important source of joy and connectedness in my life. It might even be one reason this poor blog has had fewer and fewer entries as the virtual online world has taken a back seat to real life! This all started because [...]
Persistent Yellow Jackets
Here we are on Thanksgiving, after a week of unseasonably cold weather for Eugene, and still the yellow jackets are pestering my bees. Perhaps I'm just watching more carefully this year, but I've never noticed such a persistent problem. During the summer I notice the wasps patrolling the ground in front of the hives. [...]
Environmental Implications of Pesticides with Delayed Toxicity
The debate about the environmental safety, or lack there of, for the neonicotinoid insecticides begs us to ask what would be the characteristics of an environmentally safe or benign pesticide? Despite a growing and flourishing organic agriculture movement, industrial agriculture is not going away any time soon. Hence it is important to understand how to [...]
Neonics and Bees — Political Inaction Persists Despite Mounting Evidence
Over the course of the last year, the issue of bees and the neonicotinoid pesticides has finally begun to appear in the popular press in this country. A campaign by Friends of the Earth in the UK resulted in major garden center chains removing the neonics from their shelves in February of last year. Early [...]
DateTrike Meets Burning Man
The blog has been on summer vacation, partly because I've been too busy having fun to write about it. But the seasons turn, and every year around labor day, The Man burns in the Nevada desert. This year the DateTrike made its way to Black Rock City. The original inspiration for the craft rose from [...]
