The Drum Beat is “a weekly electronic publication exploring initiatives, ideas and trends in communication for development.” This week’s edition focuses on indigenous knowledge and has lots of good stuff, including for example information on an online database of Tibetan folk medicines.
Traditional vegetables update
We finally managed to get up to grandma’s farm at the weekend, so I was able to checkup on my vegetables “experiment”. The photo shows (from the left), two varieties of Amaranthus the seeds of which I got from a market, a variety of Solanum, and a population of Amaranthus derived from seeds we collected from weedy plants on the farm. The Solanum is not doing so well so we weeded it thoroughly and made sure it was taken care a bit more, in particular through watering. The local Amaranthus population is lagging behind the market seed, but doing ok. One of the market varieties (white seeded) is doing better than the other (black seed). We’ve got one harvest off these last two already. Let’s see how long they last.
Is this good news for bees?
“I’m not convinced that it’s so much worse than what we saw in 2004 and 2005,” said Eric Mussen, a bee specialist with the University of California, Davis.
While bees are undoubtedly in trouble this year, Mussen said, there’s little evidence so far that it’s anything other than the continuation of their long struggle with disease, environmental stress and the hardship of being hauled cross-country in midwinter to pollinate crops in California.
“This time the media just became much more involved in it,” he said.
That’s from an article by Jim Downing in the Sacramento Bee. (I kid you not; it is actually a very good paper, although you may need to register and log in to see the full story, which is why I am quoting from it at some length.) Mussen is just one of the experts who says that the fuss this year about vanishing bees reflects more media interest rather than fewer bees.
“About all we’ve got is anecdotes,” said, Troy Fore, executive director of the American Beekeeping Federation.
There is, in fact, no central agency responsible for monitoring the status of honeybees in the US. News comes by word of mouth, and while some beekeepers are playing down the crisis, hoping that farmers don’t question the pollinating ability of the hives they’ve rented, others are blowing up the problem in a bid for government support.
Years ago, Mussen said, many Central Valley counties employed a bee inspector to check the health of rented hives. That person helped resolve disputes between beekeepers and farmers and served as an informal census-taker.
Today, those inspectors are scarce. One of the few remaining is Clifton Piper, who has checked hives for the Merced County Department of Agriculture since 1973. He isn’t sure about the big picture, either.
“It’s difficult to see just how short the shortage is,” he said. Beekeepers often bolster weak hives with imported packages of bees from Australia, he said. And in cold and rainy weather, it’s hard to tell whether sluggish bees in a hive are sick or simply chilly.
I suppose time, and the price of almonds, will tell.
Broadening the genetic base of cucumbers
An American cucumber breeder, Jack Staub, is collaborating with Chinese scientists to bring fresh DNA into the modern cucumber. The hope is that this will give new cucumber varieties the genetic breadth to withstand droughts and diseases. The story started 12 years ago, when Staub crossed domestic cucumbers with a newly-discovered wild Chinese variety. It wasn’t easy to get the results of the cross to grow, but now the hybrids are being evaluated to see what they might contribute to domestic cucumbers. The next step, says Staub, is to cross the cucumber with wild melons, which are closely related and which might also be able to donate valuable traits to the crop.
The story is just one of several about vegetable breeding in the latest USDA magazine.
Recording traditional knowledge
A new book sets down the “Traditional medicine of the Marshall Islands: the women, the plants, the treatments”. In a review, Professor William Aalbersberg points to a familiar driving force behind many similar compilations: that the traditional knowledge is in danger of disappearing, and without it the plants needed for traditional medicine are unlikely to be protected.