Nibbles: Bees, Millennium Villages, Oaks, Wolf, CWR

“Francis Ratnieks, the UK’s only professor of apiculture, is undertaking pioneering research based on a breed of worker bee genetically programmed to keep hives clean.”
Scaling up the Millennium Villages. Still no news on what it all means for agrobiodiversity.
Good news for New England acorn lovers. Including the artisanal pork industry?
The Ethiopian wolf is in trouble.
The Crop Wild Relatives Discussion Group reaches 250 member, 200 messages. Well done.

A paean to diverse diets is just what we all need.
And another one, from the MIT Technology Review of all places.
Menawhile, there’s only one reference to dietary diversity in the World Bank’s investment framework for nutrition.
Maybe you have to quantify that diversity before you can save it? Now where have I heard that before?
Meanwhile, Europe reports on biodiversity-friendly farming practices. Does that include the biodiversity of the actual crops? Perhaps surprisingly, yes!
You want biodiversity-friendly farming practices? Talk to Indigenous people. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has launched an e-consultation on “Preserving, strengthening and promoting Indigenous Peoples’ food and knowledge systems and traditional practices for sustainable food systems.”
There’s diversity in asparagus too.
Genebanks can help with those biodiversity-friendly practices, diverse diets and rops and Indigenous practices.
Even big international genebanks.
Even the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
But some are in trouble.
Though others are coming back.