- Resource list for setting up a school garden. Take that, Flanagan.
- Gary “Eco-gastronaut” Nabhan goes viral.
- Smithsonian goes native. Trees, that is.
- GRAIN video delves into origin of H1N1.
- There are boar farms of England?
- Nutrition advice needs to take genetics into account.
- Tracing the changing morphology of British post-medieval sheep. Well, someone has to do it.
- Thai floating market. A tourist trap, I know. But photogenic.
- Kew’s plant of the day is gum arabic. Wait, Kew has a plant of the day? Is there no end to their ingenuity?
- And GlobalDiv has a Breed of the Month. BTW, the same source has a thing on the XVIII Plant and Animal Genome Conference (Jan. 2010).
- Diverse diet for healthier bees, says BBC
- Breeding bovines in Asia.
- Cursed quinoa.
Nibbles: Cyanide, Pollinators, Artemisia, AnGR
- More carbon dioxide means more cyanide in cassava, relative to protein. Will the good news never end?
- Pollinators like diversity too.
- Another day, another genome.
- FAO surveys livestock conservation community “to evaluate the current status of existing national and multicountry conservation arrangements and reveal the possibilities for regional collaboration in the future.”
Nibbles: Colony Collapse, Chinese reforestation
- Colony Collapse Disorder: Resilience Science has the latest Science in depth, so we don’t have to.
- Increase in tree cover in Chinese villages since 1940s amounts to 1/20th of tropical deforestation. Damn!
Bee story with a sting in its tail
We’ve been a bit forgetful lately, not submitting items to Scientia Pro Publica, one of the most popular science blog carnivals around. But that doesn’t mean we’ve ignored the latest edition, at Genetic Inference. There’s a bunch of stuff there on climate change, and a link to a long post on David Roubik’s 17-year quest to understand the impact of African Killer Bees.
We nibbled Science Daily’s take on the original scientific paper, but on an amazingly busy day. So it is good to see Greg Laden take a somewhat longer view. To the press release, which he thoughtfully copies, Laden adds the observation that “the so called “African Killer Bees” are nothing other than the wild version of the honey bee,” and points out that people have a hard time relating loving, gentle European honey bees to these killers out of Africa’s dark heart. The interbreeding of wild and domesticated honeybees restored some aggression to domestic stocks and in the process of “Africanizing” them also boosted their honey-gathering abilities.
Roubik’s study concluded that although there have been swings in populations of various bee species, pollination has not suffered. Local bees, sometimes outcompeted by Africanized honeybees, are finding other flowers to sustain them. Most of the local plants are still doing fine, and some that are favoured by local bee species have even spread. But Roubik also sounded a cautionary note that hinges on the insurance value of plant biodiversity.
Basically we’re seeing ‘scramble competition’ as bees replace a lost source of pollen with pollen from a related plant species that has a similar flowering peak–in less-biodiverse, unprotected areas, bees would not have the same range of options to turn to.
That’s crucial. Roubik studied bees in “Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve — a vast area of mature tropical rainforest in Quintana Roo state on the Mexican Yucatan”. With fewer flower species among which to choose, local bees might not do so well. On the other hand, if the flower species aren’t there, they won’t suffer from the loss of local bees.
Nibble: Wild apples, Genetic erosion, Bananas, Cow DNA, Honeybee virus survey, Women and traditional agriculture
- BBC slideshow on the wild apples of Khazakhstan.
- Malawi breeder decries genetic erosion.
- Bananas good for food security in central Africa. Well, yes.
- The ruminant family tree deconstructed.
- Public to help researchers locate wild honeybee colonies in Hawaii.
- “No Pesticides No Foreign Drinks.”