CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

May 19

Choosing today from a rich menu of environmental issues:





First is honeybees. Not something we often think about, those of us who are not active beekeepers. But bees have been on my mind quite a bit since recently reading two consecutive novels in Laurie R. King's “Mary Russell” series (in which Mary Russell, a Jewish Oxford scholar from pre-1906 Earthquake San Francisco, is also the young wife-and detecting partner-of one Sherlock Holmes), The Language of Bees and The God of the Hive.





A little research indicates what a valuable part of the U.S. Agricultural economy are honeybees. $14 billion annually is the honeybee contribution, a full third or more of U.S. Crops are dependent on honeybees.


But honeybees for the past several years have been afflicted with a syndrome titled “Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder.” Worker bees become unaccountably disoriented, failing to find their hives, and often leave the larvae unattended to starve. Such is the case purported in Russell's The Language of Bees, which I read only a few short weeks before discovering this Care2.com article on Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder-yet another case of Life Imitating Art.





Although the causes aren't definitively identified, the  consequences are known. Wild honeybees are now almost nonexistent, and more than one-third of domesticated (hived) honeybees are inexplicably dying. Once again, it seems that stewardship by humanity is failing Nature.





http://www.care2.com/causes/real-food/blog/honeybee/





Kudzu: We in the South have known for six decades that this imported greenery is persistent, invasive, and takes no prisoners. Taking over buildings, utility poles, and trees, kudzu also apparently interferes with air quality as well. A new study claims that the spread of kudzu intensifies ozone, the colorless and odorless gas which is a major ingredient of smog and intensifies respiratory disorders and asthma.





http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-kudzu-20100522,0,4766936,full.story





http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/05/12/0912279107