Bee collapse continues

I had thought the process had abated and that world populations of bees were recovering, but this article in the Guardian suggests otherwise:

Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter...

The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives...

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. "We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies," said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS's bee research laboratory...

Dave Hackenberg of Hackenberg Apiaries, the Pennsylvania-based commercial beekeeper who first raised the alarm about CCD, said that last year had been the worst yet for bee losses, with 62% of his 2,600 hives dying between May 2009 and April 2010. "It's getting worse," he said. "The AIA survey doesn't give you the full picture because it is only measuring losses through the winter. In the summer the bees are exposed to lots of pesticides. Farmers mix them together and no one has any idea what the effects might be."

A Russian plumber...

...who reportedly doesn't know why people keep staring at him on the street.

Source, via.

Better than yesterday's Kentucky Derby

And if you enjoyed that, try the one which features a horse called onoitsmymotherinlaw, or any of several similar videos assembled at Mental Floss, via Miss Cellania's unparalleled humor blog.

What if the Tea Party members were black?

Some excerpts from a very thought-provoking essay:

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government...?

Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama...

Imagine that a black pastor, formerly a member of the U.S. military, were to declare, as part of his opposition to a white president’s policies, that he was ready to “suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.” This is, after all, what Pastor Stan Craig said recently at a Tea Party rally in Greenville, South Carolina...

To ask any of these questions is to answer them. Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. Which is why Rush Limbaugh could say, this past week, that the Tea Parties are the first time since the Civil War that ordinary, common Americans stood up for their rights: a statement that erases the normalcy and “American-ness” of blacks in the civil rights struggle, not to mention women in the fight for suffrage and equality, working people in the fight for better working conditions, and LGBT folks as they struggle to be treated as full and equal human beings...

Much more at the link.

See Dick run! Run, Dick, run!!

Background reference for those from other cultures.

Found at Flotsam, via Ravings of a Semi-Sane Madwoman.

Raptor shirt

Source.

Sunday smörgåsbord

Sturgeon have returned to the lakes and rivers of Northern Minnesota, where the catch-and-release season has opened, with fishermen reporting catching specimens weighing over 100 pounds.  That's not as big as they used to be, but since they live >100 years, it will take some time to restore the population to its full magnificence.

"Boy Genius" has sold his blog for several million dollars.

There's a fascinating story in the Globe and Mail about studies of a family who involuntarily make "mirror movements" with contralateral parts of their bodies because the neural motor pathways for left and right are not fully separated, as they are in everyone else.

A four-year-old boy, blind since birth, has learned to navigate using echolocation; he accomplishes this using self-generated tongue clicks, not a sound-emitting device.

The Los Angeles Times has a list of America's 20 most-visited National Monuments (not National Parks).  I was surprised at how few of them I've seen.

An inventive young man in Hong Kong uses movable walls (like the ones that libraries use for space-saving of infrequently-requested material), to enhance his 340-square-foot apartment (video at the link).

Someone claims that he can predict your gender by analyzing your browsing history.  Based apparently on my visits to Google, Blogger, StarTribune, GuardianUK, and Reddit, it says I have a 67% chance of being male.  Via J-Walk.

Lena Horne's iconic rendition of Stormy Weather.

[More to come later today - still sorting out which links to put here and which to blog separately...]

Photo credit.