I don’t blame her a bit for hating the “Newspeak of home remodeling shows”.
I would like a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy them all at once. Do these people think they’re going to win the Powerball lottery or something to pay for all of these “must-haves”?
I commuted with people who talked about how houses that had never been remodeled were worth less because reasons-that-made-no-sense-to-me. And with people who would remodel relatively new houses that they had just bought, even when it would have made more sense to have waited a year or three.
My parents had a house built for them when they retired. Not everything was built the way they wanted – they’d planned for the electrical outlets and the floor return vents to be close together, and the guy who located the vents apparently didn’t get the message – but it was very much an easy house to live in. They would, I think, have skipped the trash masher in a redo (my mother’s description is ‘it turns 10 pounds of trash into 10 pounds of trash’), but it was useful for holding large bags of cat crunchies. The kitchen was about 10 feet square, so there was room for two people to work in it at once, and room for a butcher-block table in the middle at the same time.
Lol. I kind of miss the trash compactor I had in one house. Ten pounds of trash for sure, but a heckuva lot easier to get through the door with it and to get it into the bin.
Now that we have recycling, however, I dice up the cardboard to fit one can and the other stuff would squish down as some sort of an ooky cube of nastiness, nothing much to absorb the drippy stuff, and it has to leave the house across the living room floor. Not the best arrangement, but it’s what we’ve got. As is, I have one light bag and one that isn’t light, and the little galley kitchen has no place for a compactor that wouldn’t rob me of a cabinet.
So until we invent the Acme trash dematerializer—we do it the hard way.
Never having been able to attend ShejiCon, I’m not familiar with anything but the broad strokes of your garden. Is there an out-of-the-way corner you might designate for compost (or have you already, after the potato peel debacle)? Several years back, I pulled up an inconvenient fence post from an old fence that was set in concrete. The resultant ‘peeg pit’ was a yard across and nearly that deep. Since I didn’t have enough dirt to fill it at the time, I decided to make it the compost pit. Lucky I did; a year later, the county revised its guidelines on what you could put in the green waste can, and disallowed almost everything I had been composting. I’ve had volunteer squashes grow out of it!
My father’s compost pile had a wire-mesh fence containing it. It worked pretty well. Can’t remember what size mesh it was, though. (If it was mesh like his tomato cages, it’s the kind they use for concrete: 4 or 6 inch squares.)
We bought one of the Suncast compost bins, 1 cubic yard in volume. While it worked to a degree, I don’t believe it was a practical design. I believe the biggest problem was air circulation to get to the bacteria so they could break down the vegetable matter in the bin. Even with turning the material, and that was a major undertaking as it would compact and trying to turn it with a spading fork was difficult. The top opening didn’t allow for much leverage with the fork, so even if I turned a little here, it wasn’t all that far down. I don’t know how many times I’d taken it all apart, just to move the pile, reassemble the bin and then after mixing the pile, putting it back into the bin with the fork so as not to compact it. Mother Earth News used to advertise the cylindrical bins that were on a stand and you could crank them ever so often to mix up the material inside. They aren’t cheap, though, and I didn’t ever buy one, so couldn’t comment on their efficiency. I remember watching one of the gardening shows on PBS, they said that if you could put shrimp shells into the composter, it would really add nutrients to the mix, and would “fire up” the bacterial action. I tried, it was so-so, and probably because of the way the bin was compacted. We’d end up with cherry tomatoes from years earlier, not to mention other plants, and I just got tired of it. When we moved from Virginia Beach, we took it with us, but mainly used it to compost grass clippings.
I make my own from a 50’x4′ roll of 2″x4″ fence wire. I cut 12’6″ pieces, bend over the cut ends into short hooks, and make 4 4′ tall, 4′ diameter “bins”–big enough to “heat-up”. Real cheap, very effective! I layer fresh clippings with compost from a neighboring bin. As one gets full, after a while I shovel/fork it into an empty one, “turning it”. Generally there’ll be enough “slack” that I can finally open it up when it gets too deep to comfortably shovel from.
Did I mention I mow about 1A? About half of that is front and back that I bin clippings. The other half just gets “mow and throw”.
We didn’t bother with the lawn clippings (1 1/2 acre, with windbreak); for one thing, outside of the bar ditch and the windbreak, most of the grass was too short to bother collecting, and the mower didn’t allow for a collector. The compost pile got chipped prunings instead.
Well, for those of you with 1A yards, you’ve got room. I, OTOH, have a postage stamp that’s filled with trees, shrubs, and not a lot of room for the composting bins. There is a small spot hidden in the back behind a couple of shrubs, but not much else available.
Composting only makes sense if you have a place to set up a bin or a heap or a pit, and will use the compost generated. In an apartment, it’s difficult unless you are active in a community garden or some such. For me, I luckily had a hole that needed filling 🙂 I also have a leaf pile in a back corner of the yard; I could dump the leaves in the green waste bin, but I use the bin more for tree and hedge trimmings that won’t break down easily.
I just had a ‘Wait, what??’ moment: looking out the window by my computer, I saw 4 lovebirds in the plumeria tree just outside. We’re in the tropics, but that was a first, ’cause they aren’t local! I wonder if they’re escapees or releases.
Saturday there was a hummingbird buzzing around my mock orange, prompting 3 responses: “oh wow, a hummingbird, those aren’t usually around here even in summer”, “I wonder what the poor thing would ever find to eat around here?” and the third was noting field marks so I could ask my-mother-the-birdwatcher what kind of hummingbird it was.(Mom’s been gone over a decade so this was pretty weird)
Chondrite, if it was only one lovebird I’d tend to believe an escapee. Most of the budgies I’ve owned were acquired as escapees. But 4? Mass prison break?
Hummingbird feeders can be amusing. You can just mix your own sugar water, so maintenance is cheap. I do feel, though, one should only decommission one in Spring, when the hummers have lots of food available.
One rainy, blustery Winter night, I heard some scratching on the French doors. An Anna’s Hummingbird had come in from his (yes, his) nest to the perchless feeder for a refill, and was trying to land on the mullions by the warm windows instead of flying back to his nest through the rain. Well, that wouldn’t do! I grabbed a hanger from the hall closet and lodged it in the eaves so he’d have a perch. (For some reason, landing on the porchlight housing or the fence didn’t appeal.) Even then, he didn’t seem to get the idea, so I gently lifted my hand under him. He landed; they’re quite fearless. I showed him the new perch, and after malingering in my warm hand, he flitted to it. He went back and forth to the feeder as long as I watched.
You’re welcome. I find that mullions are vertical and transoms are the horizontals. Oops. And they were just too small to land on. The poor thing kept landing and falling off.
Don’t put a feeder by a large window: they can get excited in mating season and hit clean glass.
Poor little critter! Hummingbirds are very bold and can be aggressive when fighting over territory — or the best feeder access. Sounds like this one decided the hew-mon wasn’t as bad as both starving and freezing.
Mom puts up feeders, one on the porch and one in front of the kitchen sink windows. We frequently have 2-3 little dogfights going on between ruby-throated hummers, generally the females.
There’s a hummingbird cam on a preserve in TX, on one of the migratory flyways, set up on a couple of feeders and very active in season. I can’t find the link for it at the moment, but here’s a lady who had several nests in her yard: http://phoebeallens.com/
As a general matter I disapprove of hummingbird feeders, especially after summer. It entices them to overwinter, and all it takes is one real bad storm and they’re toast, their metabolism is on such a knife-edge. All so clueless humans can say, “Look at the little hummingbird!” Hubris, IMO.
of course, with the proliferation of agricultural chemicals put on lawns, shrubs, gardens, etc., we could also be slowly poisoning those birds who sip the nectar of what plants are actually available to them.
Similar problems occurring with honey bees, especially with neonicotinoid pesticides. We don’t know enough about GMO plants yet to make an informed determination, but the neonicotinoids affect short-term memory in certain organisms, such as termites, for which they were developed. The foragers ingest the neonicotinoid-bearing material and can’t remember how to get back to the nest. Same for honey bee foragers, they can’t remember how to get back to their hives. What would the effect be on hummingbirds?
Perhaps encouraging people to take down the feeders after Labor Day might help somewhat, but other people might consider just leaving them up like they do Christmas decorations all year round…..
Neonics are over-used, and misused. But the alternatives are widely worse.
I use neonics, effectively and safely, on my rhodies. A pest from down south has invaded the PNW, lacebug (NOT laceWING, laceBUG: Stephanitis pyrioides). Rhodies are once-bloomers. I use imidacloprid impregnated clay(?) granules AFTER blooming when they are no longer attractive to bees which will: 1) kill the lacebug generations during the summer, and 2) so prevent them from laying overwintering eggs. thus preventing them from a problem in spring during blooming. I have seen evidence that treatment last several months, but not all year. But knocking down the population in this way, is highly effective (if one doesn’t have vast reservoirs of untreated and neglected plants in the neighborhood reinfecting one).
If you want to have bees to pollinate your crops, don’t RENT them! Plant year-round food for them and keep your bees at home, instead of trucking them all over the country! Bees are not some little robots to be bent to the needs of commercial agriculture. i.e. maximum profits.
I’m glad you use them safely. They’re still banned in Europe, last I checked. AND, you are not like most users. They figure that if the instructions call for 2 ounces per gallon of water, then 4 ounces or 6 ounces per gallon must be even better. This is where the problems arise, not to mention farmers who spray their fields in the vicinity of apiaries that aren’t on their property and kill the bees with the drift of their sprays. I doubt that the alternatives are widely worse if neonics were banned here. Eventually, they’re going to be as ineffective as most other chemical pesticides because of overuse and the target pest developing an immunity. Just like we do with antibiotics, we’re doing with pesticides. What’s the long-term effect.
Do you keep bees, Paul? It seems that you don’t understand the life cycle of the honey bee. The bees we use for pollination are European, which meant they evolved to deal with winter by going semi-dormant. In September or October, the queen stops laying eggs until around February. This is programmed in her DNA, she can’t change it just because she’s living in Alabama or Florida.
So, yes, in essence, they ARE little robots that have been programmed by evolution. We’re just taking advantage of them, just like we take advantage of the ability of sheep to grow wool, or apple trees to make sweeter fruit. In the Deep South, you probably could get the bees to forage year round, but they’re still “winter workers”, since the hive reduces its population in the fall. The eggs that the queen lays in October are slightly different from the ones she lays in February and into summer. Plus, all of the drones in the hive are gone with the coming of fall, they don’t “winter” with the hives, instead, they’re allowed to die because they’re a drain on the resources of the hive.
What would be the difference if I were a farmer and I kept my bees, or rented bees from a commercial beekeeper if people are still spraying neonics on their gardens or farmers are spraying their fields? Almond farmers in California need honey bees to pollinate their trees. There aren’t enough bees in California, so they’re brought out by commercial beekeepers. The are also few places where in this country you can plant year round food for bees, even if they’re not in their hives.
You’re right, bees aren’t some little robots that we can program to go to this flower or this plant. Example: In Virginia, when using bees to pollinate farm crops in July, the bees will work what’s available. As soon as the sourwood trees bloom, no matter where you put the hives, they’ll try for that sourwood because 1) it’s plentiful, 2) it’s very good nectar and turns to honey very well. How does the beekeeper tell the bees they can’t go over to that sourwood, because by doing so, they’re possibly going onto property that’s been sprayed with a neonic?
(With everybody’s kind indulgence I may have to return to this, because shortly I have to leave for an appt with a Physical Terrorist.)
No, I’m not an apiarist–an Aspie that gets focused on about any scientific subject. And a rhody hybridizer who has studied all sides of the issue of protecting my rhodies from lacebug. (This is just what Aspies do!)
I can provide a reference for my position if you want, but you’re not asking is why aren’t there enough bees in California? It’s beyond argument that the current practice of trucking bees all over the country is: 1) highly stressful on the hives increasing their vulnerability, 2) serves primarily “mechanized agriculture” to maximize the “productive” fields as if the bit they should be reserving to feed their own hives to pollinate their own fields are being “unproductive”, 3) exposes the hives to pathogens all over the place (Just how did a virus from Israel infect Austrailian and American bees anyhpw?), 4) prevents hives from becoming adapted to local conditions.
I wrote, “little robots to be bent to the needs of commercial agriculture“. Bees are not adaptable to the ways the bee-truckers want to use them. No wonder it’s a failure. DOH!
A couple of Portland apiarists have been on TV because they got tired of buying queens and having hives die over winter. So they’ve started capturing/making young queens from their hives that have overwintered strongest. DOH!
I read just this week about work being done with some bees that have grooming instincts! They remove the varoa mites pesticide free. DOH!
When I wrote that farmers should plant food crops for their own hives, they need to even if they don’t have hives. They need to support their wild bees–honey bees aren’t the only way important agricultural crops are pollinated.
The problem with the ban movement is The Law is absolutist, Nature is all about balance. The Law can’t handle that. The one law I can imagine that would help this problem is a Mann Act for bees in 2018–prohibit sending bees across state lines! “Oh! Disaster! You’ll destroy agriculture!” Only the way you particularly want to do it. It’ll save agriculture reasonably quickly.
What is the reason for banning neonics (to protect the bees) from use on wind-pollinated plants, i.e. corn, wheat, etc.? (That’s not at issue because bees aren’t used there, farmers don’t maintain hives, even though bees might collect grains’ pollen.) This is one of the highest tonnage uses of neonics, but it’s not sprayed–the seeds are coated! (Too much in some cases to be sure, as they “dust”.) Not a significant threat to bees.
Neither is the home gardener as much of a threat as you suggest. It’s concentrated in cities, and there’s just not enough of it used in home applications to threaten agricultural uses of bees. Nevertheless, for these uses black label prohibitions on everblooming flowering plants are appropriate.
The point is, to borrow a quote, neonics don’t kill bees, people do! We had two instances “locally” of linden trees in full bloom being sprayed with neonics and 50,000 dead bees on the ground. Hold the people who did it strictly responsible. As with those who let their spray get away, or overdose. You’ll note I don’t spray, I use granules that I put in my containers with measuring spoons–nothing gets away from me.
You don’t believe neonics are the best we’ve had? Have you researched it? I have. Yes, indeed, the insecticides used before the neonics were worse, more toxic, less controllable.
The broader point you make about how we misuse effective remedies in ways that destroy their effectiveness is certainly true, and gets back to a headline on a supermarket tabloid: Shocking truth! 50% of Americans are below average! I hate to say it, but there are some ways in which democratic processes are not in our best interests!
Neonics, just as everything else need to used wisely and properly, and need to be available for use.
What is this . . . “storm” . . . of which you speak?
I don’t think they can see heat, but with all the ins and outs of my home, warm places are available. Safe, warm places, though a hummer might not see them as safe. But, the case I mentioned was the only time I noticed any need for more warmth.
Still, as I mentioned, I do feel responsible for caring for them through Winter, and I’m more aware of weather and its effects on them than if I had not fed them. Knowledge is a good thing, I think.
They also buzz very loudly when they are arguing over territory. The first time I saw them it was because of the noise – and it was two males debating the ownership of a blooming trumpet vine.
And rhodies as well. 😉 Without honeybees and honey, life would be less pleasant. Without pollinators, life would be grim. We need to be a whole lot smarter about how we manage the “anthropocene epoch”, e.g. global warming.
I don’t blame her a bit for hating the “Newspeak of home remodeling shows”.
I would like a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy them all at once. Do these people think they’re going to win the Powerball lottery or something to pay for all of these “must-haves”?
I commuted with people who talked about how houses that had never been remodeled were worth less because reasons-that-made-no-sense-to-me. And with people who would remodel relatively new houses that they had just bought, even when it would have made more sense to have waited a year or three.
My parents had a house built for them when they retired. Not everything was built the way they wanted – they’d planned for the electrical outlets and the floor return vents to be close together, and the guy who located the vents apparently didn’t get the message – but it was very much an easy house to live in. They would, I think, have skipped the trash masher in a redo (my mother’s description is ‘it turns 10 pounds of trash into 10 pounds of trash’), but it was useful for holding large bags of cat crunchies. The kitchen was about 10 feet square, so there was room for two people to work in it at once, and room for a butcher-block table in the middle at the same time.
Lol. I kind of miss the trash compactor I had in one house. Ten pounds of trash for sure, but a heckuva lot easier to get through the door with it and to get it into the bin.
Now that we have recycling, however, I dice up the cardboard to fit one can and the other stuff would squish down as some sort of an ooky cube of nastiness, nothing much to absorb the drippy stuff, and it has to leave the house across the living room floor. Not the best arrangement, but it’s what we’ve got. As is, I have one light bag and one that isn’t light, and the little galley kitchen has no place for a compactor that wouldn’t rob me of a cabinet.
So until we invent the Acme trash dematerializer—we do it the hard way.
Never having been able to attend ShejiCon, I’m not familiar with anything but the broad strokes of your garden. Is there an out-of-the-way corner you might designate for compost (or have you already, after the potato peel debacle)? Several years back, I pulled up an inconvenient fence post from an old fence that was set in concrete. The resultant ‘peeg pit’ was a yard across and nearly that deep. Since I didn’t have enough dirt to fill it at the time, I decided to make it the compost pit. Lucky I did; a year later, the county revised its guidelines on what you could put in the green waste can, and disallowed almost everything I had been composting. I’ve had volunteer squashes grow out of it!
My father’s compost pile had a wire-mesh fence containing it. It worked pretty well. Can’t remember what size mesh it was, though. (If it was mesh like his tomato cages, it’s the kind they use for concrete: 4 or 6 inch squares.)
Jane bought one, and it was a disaster. I lean toward the pit rather than a plastic container.
We bought one of the Suncast compost bins, 1 cubic yard in volume. While it worked to a degree, I don’t believe it was a practical design. I believe the biggest problem was air circulation to get to the bacteria so they could break down the vegetable matter in the bin. Even with turning the material, and that was a major undertaking as it would compact and trying to turn it with a spading fork was difficult. The top opening didn’t allow for much leverage with the fork, so even if I turned a little here, it wasn’t all that far down. I don’t know how many times I’d taken it all apart, just to move the pile, reassemble the bin and then after mixing the pile, putting it back into the bin with the fork so as not to compact it. Mother Earth News used to advertise the cylindrical bins that were on a stand and you could crank them ever so often to mix up the material inside. They aren’t cheap, though, and I didn’t ever buy one, so couldn’t comment on their efficiency. I remember watching one of the gardening shows on PBS, they said that if you could put shrimp shells into the composter, it would really add nutrients to the mix, and would “fire up” the bacterial action. I tried, it was so-so, and probably because of the way the bin was compacted. We’d end up with cherry tomatoes from years earlier, not to mention other plants, and I just got tired of it. When we moved from Virginia Beach, we took it with us, but mainly used it to compost grass clippings.
I make my own from a 50’x4′ roll of 2″x4″ fence wire. I cut 12’6″ pieces, bend over the cut ends into short hooks, and make 4 4′ tall, 4′ diameter “bins”–big enough to “heat-up”. Real cheap, very effective! I layer fresh clippings with compost from a neighboring bin. As one gets full, after a while I shovel/fork it into an empty one, “turning it”. Generally there’ll be enough “slack” that I can finally open it up when it gets too deep to comfortably shovel from.
Did I mention I mow about 1A? About half of that is front and back that I bin clippings. The other half just gets “mow and throw”.
We didn’t bother with the lawn clippings (1 1/2 acre, with windbreak); for one thing, outside of the bar ditch and the windbreak, most of the grass was too short to bother collecting, and the mower didn’t allow for a collector. The compost pile got chipped prunings instead.
Well, for those of you with 1A yards, you’ve got room. I, OTOH, have a postage stamp that’s filled with trees, shrubs, and not a lot of room for the composting bins. There is a small spot hidden in the back behind a couple of shrubs, but not much else available.
Composting only makes sense if you have a place to set up a bin or a heap or a pit, and will use the compost generated. In an apartment, it’s difficult unless you are active in a community garden or some such. For me, I luckily had a hole that needed filling 🙂 I also have a leaf pile in a back corner of the yard; I could dump the leaves in the green waste bin, but I use the bin more for tree and hedge trimmings that won’t break down easily.
I just had a ‘Wait, what??’ moment: looking out the window by my computer, I saw 4 lovebirds in the plumeria tree just outside. We’re in the tropics, but that was a first, ’cause they aren’t local! I wonder if they’re escapees or releases.
Neat! Could be winds that blew them. Canada geese end up in Britain.
Saturday there was a hummingbird buzzing around my mock orange, prompting 3 responses: “oh wow, a hummingbird, those aren’t usually around here even in summer”, “I wonder what the poor thing would ever find to eat around here?” and the third was noting field marks so I could ask my-mother-the-birdwatcher what kind of hummingbird it was.(Mom’s been gone over a decade so this was pretty weird)
Chondrite, if it was only one lovebird I’d tend to believe an escapee. Most of the budgies I’ve owned were acquired as escapees. But 4? Mass prison break?
Hummingbird feeders can be amusing. You can just mix your own sugar water, so maintenance is cheap. I do feel, though, one should only decommission one in Spring, when the hummers have lots of food available.
One rainy, blustery Winter night, I heard some scratching on the French doors. An Anna’s Hummingbird had come in from his (yes, his) nest to the perchless feeder for a refill, and was trying to land on the mullions by the warm windows instead of flying back to his nest through the rain. Well, that wouldn’t do! I grabbed a hanger from the hall closet and lodged it in the eaves so he’d have a perch. (For some reason, landing on the porchlight housing or the fence didn’t appeal.) Even then, he didn’t seem to get the idea, so I gently lifted my hand under him. He landed; they’re quite fearless. I showed him the new perch, and after malingering in my warm hand, he flitted to it. He went back and forth to the feeder as long as I watched.
How lovely! Thanks for that vignette, Walt.
You’re welcome. I find that mullions are vertical and transoms are the horizontals. Oops. And they were just too small to land on. The poor thing kept landing and falling off.
Don’t put a feeder by a large window: they can get excited in mating season and hit clean glass.
Poor little critter! Hummingbirds are very bold and can be aggressive when fighting over territory — or the best feeder access. Sounds like this one decided the hew-mon wasn’t as bad as both starving and freezing.
Mom puts up feeders, one on the porch and one in front of the kitchen sink windows. We frequently have 2-3 little dogfights going on between ruby-throated hummers, generally the females.
There’s a hummingbird cam on a preserve in TX, on one of the migratory flyways, set up on a couple of feeders and very active in season. I can’t find the link for it at the moment, but here’s a lady who had several nests in her yard:
http://phoebeallens.com/
Hah! Found it, but it’s offline for the winter:
http://cams.allaboutbirds.org/channel/50/West_Texas_Hummingbirds/
As a general matter I disapprove of hummingbird feeders, especially after summer. It entices them to overwinter, and all it takes is one real bad storm and they’re toast, their metabolism is on such a knife-edge. All so clueless humans can say, “Look at the little hummingbird!” Hubris, IMO.
of course, with the proliferation of agricultural chemicals put on lawns, shrubs, gardens, etc., we could also be slowly poisoning those birds who sip the nectar of what plants are actually available to them.
Similar problems occurring with honey bees, especially with neonicotinoid pesticides. We don’t know enough about GMO plants yet to make an informed determination, but the neonicotinoids affect short-term memory in certain organisms, such as termites, for which they were developed. The foragers ingest the neonicotinoid-bearing material and can’t remember how to get back to the nest. Same for honey bee foragers, they can’t remember how to get back to their hives. What would the effect be on hummingbirds?
Perhaps encouraging people to take down the feeders after Labor Day might help somewhat, but other people might consider just leaving them up like they do Christmas decorations all year round…..
Neonics are over-used, and misused. But the alternatives are widely worse.
I use neonics, effectively and safely, on my rhodies. A pest from down south has invaded the PNW, lacebug (NOT laceWING, laceBUG: Stephanitis pyrioides). Rhodies are once-bloomers. I use imidacloprid impregnated clay(?) granules AFTER blooming when they are no longer attractive to bees which will: 1) kill the lacebug generations during the summer, and 2) so prevent them from laying overwintering eggs. thus preventing them from a problem in spring during blooming. I have seen evidence that treatment last several months, but not all year. But knocking down the population in this way, is highly effective (if one doesn’t have vast reservoirs of untreated and neglected plants in the neighborhood reinfecting one).
If you want to have bees to pollinate your crops, don’t RENT them! Plant year-round food for them and keep your bees at home, instead of trucking them all over the country! Bees are not some little robots to be bent to the needs of commercial agriculture. i.e. maximum profits.
I’m glad you use them safely. They’re still banned in Europe, last I checked. AND, you are not like most users. They figure that if the instructions call for 2 ounces per gallon of water, then 4 ounces or 6 ounces per gallon must be even better. This is where the problems arise, not to mention farmers who spray their fields in the vicinity of apiaries that aren’t on their property and kill the bees with the drift of their sprays. I doubt that the alternatives are widely worse if neonics were banned here. Eventually, they’re going to be as ineffective as most other chemical pesticides because of overuse and the target pest developing an immunity. Just like we do with antibiotics, we’re doing with pesticides. What’s the long-term effect.
Do you keep bees, Paul? It seems that you don’t understand the life cycle of the honey bee. The bees we use for pollination are European, which meant they evolved to deal with winter by going semi-dormant. In September or October, the queen stops laying eggs until around February. This is programmed in her DNA, she can’t change it just because she’s living in Alabama or Florida.
So, yes, in essence, they ARE little robots that have been programmed by evolution. We’re just taking advantage of them, just like we take advantage of the ability of sheep to grow wool, or apple trees to make sweeter fruit. In the Deep South, you probably could get the bees to forage year round, but they’re still “winter workers”, since the hive reduces its population in the fall. The eggs that the queen lays in October are slightly different from the ones she lays in February and into summer. Plus, all of the drones in the hive are gone with the coming of fall, they don’t “winter” with the hives, instead, they’re allowed to die because they’re a drain on the resources of the hive.
What would be the difference if I were a farmer and I kept my bees, or rented bees from a commercial beekeeper if people are still spraying neonics on their gardens or farmers are spraying their fields? Almond farmers in California need honey bees to pollinate their trees. There aren’t enough bees in California, so they’re brought out by commercial beekeepers. The are also few places where in this country you can plant year round food for bees, even if they’re not in their hives.
You’re right, bees aren’t some little robots that we can program to go to this flower or this plant. Example: In Virginia, when using bees to pollinate farm crops in July, the bees will work what’s available. As soon as the sourwood trees bloom, no matter where you put the hives, they’ll try for that sourwood because 1) it’s plentiful, 2) it’s very good nectar and turns to honey very well. How does the beekeeper tell the bees they can’t go over to that sourwood, because by doing so, they’re possibly going onto property that’s been sprayed with a neonic?
@Joe Re: Bees & Chicken Little
(With everybody’s kind indulgence I may have to return to this, because shortly I have to leave for an appt with a Physical Terrorist.)
No, I’m not an apiarist–an Aspie that gets focused on about any scientific subject. And a rhody hybridizer who has studied all sides of the issue of protecting my rhodies from lacebug. (This is just what Aspies do!)
I can provide a reference for my position if you want, but you’re not asking is why aren’t there enough bees in California? It’s beyond argument that the current practice of trucking bees all over the country is: 1) highly stressful on the hives increasing their vulnerability, 2) serves primarily “mechanized agriculture” to maximize the “productive” fields as if the bit they should be reserving to feed their own hives to pollinate their own fields are being “unproductive”, 3) exposes the hives to pathogens all over the place (Just how did a virus from Israel infect Austrailian and American bees anyhpw?), 4) prevents hives from becoming adapted to local conditions.
I must go right now!
@Joe Re: Bees & Chicken Little cont’d
(That wasn’t so bad.)
I wrote, “little robots to be bent to the needs of commercial agriculture“. Bees are not adaptable to the ways the bee-truckers want to use them. No wonder it’s a failure. DOH!
A couple of Portland apiarists have been on TV because they got tired of buying queens and having hives die over winter. So they’ve started capturing/making young queens from their hives that have overwintered strongest. DOH!
I read just this week about work being done with some bees that have grooming instincts! They remove the varoa mites pesticide free. DOH!
When I wrote that farmers should plant food crops for their own hives, they need to even if they don’t have hives. They need to support their wild bees–honey bees aren’t the only way important agricultural crops are pollinated.
The problem with the ban movement is The Law is absolutist, Nature is all about balance. The Law can’t handle that. The one law I can imagine that would help this problem is a Mann Act for bees in 2018–prohibit sending bees across state lines! “Oh! Disaster! You’ll destroy agriculture!” Only the way you particularly want to do it. It’ll save agriculture reasonably quickly.
What is the reason for banning neonics (to protect the bees) from use on wind-pollinated plants, i.e. corn, wheat, etc.? (That’s not at issue because bees aren’t used there, farmers don’t maintain hives, even though bees might collect grains’ pollen.) This is one of the highest tonnage uses of neonics, but it’s not sprayed–the seeds are coated! (Too much in some cases to be sure, as they “dust”.) Not a significant threat to bees.
Neither is the home gardener as much of a threat as you suggest. It’s concentrated in cities, and there’s just not enough of it used in home applications to threaten agricultural uses of bees. Nevertheless, for these uses black label prohibitions on everblooming flowering plants are appropriate.
The point is, to borrow a quote, neonics don’t kill bees, people do! We had two instances “locally” of linden trees in full bloom being sprayed with neonics and 50,000 dead bees on the ground. Hold the people who did it strictly responsible. As with those who let their spray get away, or overdose. You’ll note I don’t spray, I use granules that I put in my containers with measuring spoons–nothing gets away from me.
You don’t believe neonics are the best we’ve had? Have you researched it? I have. Yes, indeed, the insecticides used before the neonics were worse, more toxic, less controllable.
The broader point you make about how we misuse effective remedies in ways that destroy their effectiveness is certainly true, and gets back to a headline on a supermarket tabloid: Shocking truth! 50% of Americans are below average! I hate to say it, but there are some ways in which democratic processes are not in our best interests!
Neonics, just as everything else need to used wisely and properly, and need to be available for use.
What is this . . . “storm” . . . of which you speak?
I don’t think they can see heat, but with all the ins and outs of my home, warm places are available. Safe, warm places, though a hummer might not see them as safe. But, the case I mentioned was the only time I noticed any need for more warmth.
Still, as I mentioned, I do feel responsible for caring for them through Winter, and I’m more aware of weather and its effects on them than if I had not fed them. Knowledge is a good thing, I think.
Very neat. Dad had one that would come and do hi-lows outside the window if the feeder was out. 😉
They also buzz very loudly when they are arguing over territory. The first time I saw them it was because of the noise – and it was two males debating the ownership of a blooming trumpet vine.
@Paul, I believe we have differing points of view on honey bees.
And rhodies as well. 😉 Without honeybees and honey, life would be less pleasant. Without pollinators, life would be grim. We need to be a whole lot smarter about how we manage the “anthropocene epoch”, e.g. global warming.