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MEPs to save bees

Bee pollination accounts for 76 per cent of food production and 84 per cent of plant species.

OK, I know it is Friday and I am tired, but what on earth does that sentence mean? Quite apart from the spurious accuracy of 76 1 and 84. I’m glad to know that MEPs back plans to combat decreasing bee numbers, as reported by The Parliament, and that “the European parliament’s agriculture and rural development committee voted through a resolution on the issue on Thursday”. Alas, the report tells me nothing about the resolution and how it will actually help bees and beekeepers, nor where I can find out more.

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Toma cheese, phone home

“It’s not difficult,” Dr Lombardi said. “What is more difficult is to deliver the product the consumer wants, something not perfect, but with no big flaws either.”

What’s not difficult? To stick an RFID chip and a printed code on the wrapper of a cheese. The code can be read by a smartphone and links the cheese lover “to a phone-optimised website that allows them to browse the information registered about the cheese”.

Matt reports from Terra Madre on a scheme that hopes to add value to Europe’s vast diversity of cheeses and the breeds and ecosystems that produce in a way that even I can understand (and use).

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Old and new Nordic spring wheats side by side

Pictures being worth a thousand words, and all that, here are pictures — moving pictures, no less — of some Swedish wheats that were planted out for regeneration and characterization earlier in 2010.

Thanks Dag for the link. How hard would it be to make links to this sort of thing available from all-knowing databases, I wonder? Dag thanks the film-maker, Axel Diederichsen, for putting the names of the varieties into his description of the film, and suggests adding the accession numbers. If everyone did that, some kind of spider could surely crawl the web looking for, and linking to, any and all mentions of the number, and linking to them. With human curation, of course.

Is that crazy?

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Fruit tree genebank faces the chop

An important field genebank of rare fruit trees faces an uncertain future as a result of financial support. No, not that one. Bioversity International reports that the Pomona Botanical Conservatory in Apulia, Italy, has failed to obtain a much needed grant to support its activities.

And in other threatened genebank news, our friends in the north report a visit from Swedish National TV to the Nordic Genetic Resources Center to cover budget cuts there.

According to our friends, half the staff will lose their jobs at the start of 2011 if the crisis is not resolved, “and the Nordic countries may start to lose the genebank collection of genetic resources carefully preserved during more than three decades”.

How fine that all this should be happening as the world discusses the conservation of biodiversity at Nagoya.