Environmental News

Sorry, I remembered it was a silver compound.

Bob Wilson

 

I believe it was successfully performed by the RAF and blamed for the massive flooding in Lynmouth Devon in the 1950s.

 

No one else has anything to add on this topic? Or did I kill it?

 

Fascinating!

 

There is a bee mite: A new way of protecting bees against varroa mites | Bee Care

Apparently Bayer is working on a 'gate' to 'dip' the parasite from the worker bees.


Bob Wilson

 

A little playing card? Are Chinese bees smarter than American bees? What I see here are a pattern of four differing large color bars or patches across the top or bottom edge of the box, on the entrance side.

 

They might still be able to detect minor subtle differences human eyes might miss!

A recent BBC Four program presented by entomologist, George McGavin illustrated the the fantastic accuracy of swarm mentality. BBC One - Ultimate Swarms . You may not be able to get it via the iPlayer, but some of you might have a workaround, YMMV.

Apparently, at an agricultural show in England near the end of the 20th century a prize was awarded for the person guessing the weight of a cow; a common raffle-like competition much loved for centuries. Anyway, , some mathematician studied the total result and found that the most accurate prediction could be reached by averaging the total guesses from the crowd. This phenomena was subsequently repeated at another event with an expert cowman using his best guess as the experiment control. Remarkably, the crowd's average guess was even closer to the cow's real weight than the expert's guess! We were told that this can be repeated across any similar test where the ridiculously high guesses tend to cancel out the unlikely low ones to leave a really close prediction.

Then George why on to say that the bees use the same method to find the perfect hive for a swarm. During the swarm phase, the bees seem to lose their defence posture temporarily and locate a suitable new Queen using pheromones and cluster around anything convenient to support them They then send out scouts to find a suitable hive, with a Goldilocks sized entrance (not too big to allow predators in and not to small) which ideally faces East in the northern hemisphere hemisphere to catch the first days of the morning sun. On locating a possible huge for the swarm the scout returns to the swarm and does the wiggle dance. While wiggling, he spins around (the number of rotations suggesting how far away, and the angle when stopped the direction from the swarm to the potential hive. During the spin, one or more bees seem to be nudging him out of kilter and it is the determination he displays together with the vigour of his dance that tells how confident he is in his discovery. All this time, other scouts are performing similar ritualistic dances and the swarm has to make a critical decision on which site would be perfect. Get it wrong and the hive could well fail - fatally! The TV crew set up three hives near their swarm, all very similar but only one ideal. Eventually, more and more bees set of to investigate the hives and reinforced the 'dance' of the best option. Before long the majority were entering the ideal hive and soon the entire swarm had moved in with the new Queen and normal defensive posture was resumed. The swarm phase was over!

 

"... the approach which involves amending soils with abundant crushed silicate rocks, like basalt, left over from ancient volcanic eruptions. As these minute rock grains dissolve chemically in soils, they take up carbon dioxide..."

(From a non-chemist viewpoint ...) This sounds chemically similar to the CCS (carbon capture and sequestration) path of capturing CO2 from fossil fuel burning, and injecting it into basalt formations where most of it quickly solidifies into carbonates. Except this could retroactively capture past carbon emissions, or remotely capture current emissions. And it wouldn't have to compete economically against other sources of energy production, which CCS-coal will have a difficult time doing. And if its agricultural benefits are large enough, we won't even have to subsidize farmers to do this.

My region has vast stores of basalt. And plenty of adjacent agricultural land that could potentially use it, if the concept proves workable.

Please keep us updated if you run across any additional news on this idea.