Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Like a perfectly assembled buffet, everyone should be able to find something nourishing in Fidel Castro’s latest essay: Where Have All the Bees Gone? And Other Reflections on the Internationalization of Genocide ((Actually, I don’t know whether that is the title he gave it himself, but it’ll do)). Ranging across more topics than you can …
Back in October 2006 the Royal Society published an online version of a comprehensive study that was the first attempt to put a global value on pollinators. It attracted some attention back then, at The Worsted Witch, who got it from Science Daily. We missed it at the time ((Probably because the whole site was …
It seems you can hardly open a newspaper these days — or open a news website — without reading that someone somewhere has mapped yet another genome, whether human, Neanderthal, sheep, mouse or bee. It hasn’t received any press coverage at all, but the taro (Colocasia esculenta) genome has now been added to the list. …
The New York Times picked up the Bees in Peril story and amplified it considerably. More interesting still, over at Resilience Science Garry Peterson points out that maybe the decline in pollinators is linked to the fact that introduced European bees have displaced natural populations to such an extent, and that the bees are now …
Things don’t seem to be getting any easier for the fruit and vegetable farmers of the US, with a continuing shortage of bees. The number of commercial colonies in the US has halved over the past 25 years, according to the report. And that could show up in the price of almonds. I had no …