Bees and Neonic Building Products, A Lethal Cocktail

Story ran in Malibu Times, June 24, 2017

It’s National Pollinator Week and a terrific time to celebrate the bees because they are golden-haired pollinators, hand-picked by nature over 100 million years ago. They ensure that floral diversity proliferates. Today, bees pollinate over 80 percent of 400,000 flowering plants and maintain our urban centers. Almost 250 million Americans, or 81 percent of our population, live in cities. Urban bees face a new deadly threat to their crucial role as pollinators.

A class of systemic insecticides known as neonicotinoids (neonics) synthetically mimics a plant compound found in tomatoes, peppers, potatoes and tobacco. A neuro-active insecticide fashioned after nicotine, neonics poison nerves and prevent acetylcholine from enabling neurons to communicate with each other and with muscle tissue. In humans, for instance, these substances would trigger Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. Neonics kill bees, soil organisms and contaminate water.

Dutch toxicologist Dr Henk Tennekes reported that imidacloprid, made by Bayer, contaminated western Dutch surface water and killed springtails, beetles and earthworms. Those insects are a crucial food source for many common grassland bird species. Moving up the food chain, Tennekes discovered that populations of avian predators like Eurasian goshawks and northern goshawks have likewise fallen dramatically. Neonics have impoverished the web of life in Western Europe.

In January, the EPA reported that the most widely used neonic imidacloprid was deadly for bees. According to the EPA, bees are sensitive to as little as 25 parts per billion of imidacloprid. From April 2015 to May 2016, a record 44 percent of U.S. honeybees perished, up from the previous year’s record death rate of 40.6 percent.

Since 2001 the EPA has quietly green-lighted neonics in building products like wood decking (replacing chromated copper arsenate), vinyl siding, adhesive glues and caulking and polystyrene insulation. One concern with neonics in building products is the effect upon urban bees, which pollinate urban plants and trees. Urban trees provide crucial habitat for critters and shade for homes, which can reduce cooling costs by as much as 50 percent. Urban trees enhance the value of homes; neighborhoods with trees are healthier than those without.

Urban honey-, bumble- and wild-bees visit construction sites, collect saw dust, return to their hives or individual chambers to make a potent antiviral, antifungal, antibacteria, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer glue called propolis. The urban bees that visit construction sites are now at risk of carrying lethal neonics back to their hives. Bees also collect caulking and glues from construction site to make propolis, which may be laced with neonics. The sawdust from wood decking and other construction residue on sites containing neonics leaches into soil, so when rainfall occurs and bees drink from construction puddles they, too, may be contaminated with neonics. Propolis that is contaminated with neonics poisons the hive and contributes to rising bee deaths across the nation.

There are at least six companies that sell imidacloprid in wood decking in America, including Lanxess, spun-off from Bayer in 2004; Arch Treatment Technologies; United Phosphorus; Viance; Willowood; and Zelam. Viance suggests a minimum of 11 parts per million (ppm) of imidaclporid as an effective treatment against termites. Lanxess suggests treating wood at 300 ppm. Polystyrene treated insulation contains 200 ppm of imidacloprid. Adhesive caulkings have up to 1,200 ppm of imidacloprid. Plastic poly vinyl siding contains up to 10,000ppm of imidacloprid — that’s 400,000 times above the EPA threshold for toxicity to bees in plant nectar.

One natural alternative to imidacloprid that protects against termites is the Indian neem tree. Azadirachtin is neem’s main defense. It blocks and disrupts growth and reproduction of insects like termites. Turplex, Azatin EC, Align, Bioneem and Margosan-O are all neem-based products available in America that protect against termites. Neem extracts are harmless to pollinators like bees, butterflies, moths, beetles and bats as well as beneficial insects such as spiders, ladybugs and dragonflies, as well as warm-blooded animals and birds.

The unforeseen consequence of incorporating neonics into building products for urban bees is a disaster in the making. The bees are modern day canaries in the coalmines. Rachel Carson’s award-winning book Silent Spring warned that new classes of pesticides were biocides; they kill many living things other than target species.

It is time for the EPA to end poisonous neonics in building products because we need the urban bees to survive. Bees give us our food, clothes (cotton), 450 million pounds of honey and 9 million pounds of beeswax to shine our cars each year in America, and potent apis therapy pain medicines for rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia and multiple sclerosis.

If the bees die, we die.

Earth Doctor Reese Halter is a broadcaster, biologist and author of The Incomparable Honeybee & The Economics of Pollination.

 

The Humble Honeybee

Story ran in HuffPo June 9, 2017

Honeybee loading pollen into her corbicula (or pollen basket) from lemon blossom in Hollywood, Calif. Photo credit: Reese Halter

Honeybees are incomparable little creatures. Allow me to tell you why:

Honeybees and humans share many things in common: we socialize, dance, eat honey, touch, feel, mimic one another, sleep, enjoy nicotine, caffeine, vote and we both get sick.

After a queen honeybee lays a couple million eggs, she begins to produce fewer pheromones (or chemical scents), which cause the worker bees to feed half a dozen larvae royal jelly or pure protein as they begin rearing a new queen.

It’s up to the scout bees to locate a new site to move the existing queen and thousands of workers to create with their beeswax a new hive. The bees reach a consensus on a new location by voting. Research has shown that 15 is the crucial number of scout bees for a quorum. Then they wait for the signal to evacuate.

Are you like me and millions of other people who find our morning caffeine buzz irresistible? Well – we’re not alone – our friends the honeybees also seek a morning buzzfrom flowers containing nectar laced with caffeine. That caffeine boosts the bees’ memories causing the buzzed forager bees, returning to the hive, to dance vigorously and communicate to other bees the precise location of the caffeinated flowers. It seems that some plants have evolved an ingenious mechanism of using caffeine as a drug to get the upper hand on the bees to pollinate their flowers first.

Not only do bees pollinate 75 percent of all the world’s food crops, but also all the cotton we wear. Honeybees produce an astounding 2.6 billion pounds of honey each year for humans. One teaspoon of honey weighing 21 grams contains 16 grams of sugar or 60 calories. It takes 12 honeybees a combined flying distance of about 6,000 miles, or their entire foraging lives, to produce those 21 grams of honey. Normally, a forager honeybees dies because after flying 500 miles in three weeks and visiting almost a million flowers, she wears her wings out or to put it another way – she works herself to death.

These admirable little creatures can count to four and they can be trained to arrive at three, four and five separate periods during 24 hours.

For the previous 15 years, my colleagues have been training honeybees to identify over 60 different odors ranging from enriched uranium to tuberculosis, methamphetamine (or crystal meth) and TNT the main explosive in landmines. Honeybees are now being deployed instead of sniffer dogs to locate more than 250,000 landmines at sites left behind in the 1990s war in former Yugoslavia. By the way, sniffer dogs cost $9,000 each, are accurate approximately 71 percent of the time, require three months of intensive training and they get maimed. Honeybees, on the other hand, are accurate 98 percent of the time, require less than 10 minutes of training and they preclude sniffer dogs from being harmed or killed. By finding those unexploded landmines our friends the humble honeybees will help prevent the maiming of hundreds of children playing in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Just like people and dogs, bees get sad when they are handled or manipulated too much or if they don’t get enough sleep when predators repeatedly attack them. Bees learn while asleep and they may dream too. Bees show similar signs of pessimism seen in depressed or anxious people.

Honeybees and people even share genetic similarities. Some thrill seeking honeybees, just like people, are drawn to adventure. And there are over 1,000 genetic differencesthat affect a bee’s likelihood of being a thrill seeker.

There are approximately one million neurons in a bee’s brain and some of those neurons are responsible for giving honeybees distinct personalities. The more we learn about the bees, the more remarkable these creatures become.

Bee deaths in America are at an all time annual high of 44 percent. In addition, 749 native bee species in North America and Hawaii are heading towards extinction from pesticides, habitat loss and the climate crisis. It’s long over due that we protect the bees, at all costs, from deadly neonicotinoid pesticides. We need healthy bees in order to feed a human population adding almost 90 million people a year, as the United Nations predicts we will top 8.5 billion humans by 2030.

Earth Doctor Reese Halter is the author of “The Incomparable Honeybee.”

Nature’s Bioshield for Bees

Story ran in HuffPo August 26, 2016

The fate of the honeybees and humans is inexorably linked.

The bees provide us our food and clothes (cotton). In addition to 2.6 billion pounds of honey and 44 million pounds of beeswax each year, bees provide potent pain and cancer medicines.

The key to our survival lies in working with nature, not against her.

Scientists from the University of Maryland and the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently identified as many as 21 pesticides and fungicides in plant pollen found inside honeybee hives.

Nursery bees mix protein-rich plant pollen with honey, known as beebread, and feed it to developing larvae. That protein is of paramount importance because it builds healthy autoimmune systems and bee brains. There are approximately one million neurons in a bee’s brain and some of those neurons are responsible for giving honeybees distinctpersonalities.

When healthy honeybee larvae were fed pollen contaminated with fungicide like those used in some apple orchards, they were three times more likely to be attacked by parasite.

America is suffering its worst bee crisis. Last year, 44 percent of U.S. honeybees died.

That is an astounding 58 billion bee deaths.

Beekeeping in America is quickly becoming a non-starter business. Is there a way to protect the honeybees from these deadly agricultural chemicals?

My colleagues at Washington State University undertook a longevity stress test on honeybee populations. They found beneficial fungi that bees collect in their environment turn on genes for detoxification pathways in honeybees. Red-belted polypore mushrooms are known to breakdown pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.

Agricultural fungicides reduce beneficial fungi in honeybee colonies. In turn, this shuts off the bees’ beneficial fungi precluding detoxification of colonies. Instead, beehives accumulate poisons and die.

That is Colony Collapse Disorder.

A solution called mycohoney made from polypore mushroom mycelium or roots and honey is a powerful antidote. When bees are fed mycohoney it extends their lives significantly.

We need the bees and the bees need polypore mushrooms. It is nature’s bee medicine.

We also have nature’s flawless blueprint SMART (Sporulating Mushrooms and Repelling Technology) pesticides from fungi that can easily and affordably replace 5.2 billion pounds each year of agricultural chemicals thereby preventing the death of nature on farmer’s fields including honeybees.

#SaveNatureNow

Earth Doctor Reese Halter is the author of “The Incomparable Honeybee & The Economics of Pollination.”

Honeybees, Elephants and Humans: Coexisting

Story ran in Huffington Post, Oct. 22, 2016

The only way 7.5 billion procreating humans and the Animal Kingdom can survive in the 21st century is by coexisting.

One excellent example of coexisting comes from a respectful relationship with irascible African honeybees and giant elephants.

Elephants, like so many other creatures, dislike getting stung, especially near their eyes, ears and trunks. Repeated bee stings can kill calves. So elephants avoid confrontations with honeybees.

Elephants communicate with astounding frequencies ranging over 10 octaves. Human speech, on the other hand, only spans two octaves. Elephants use very low frequencies, undetectable to the human ear. Elephants convey important information using infrasonic frequencies, which travel over six miles and are received by vibrational sensors on their feet and trunks.

Honeybees produce low frequency hums, easily discernible by elephants. Since elephants are intelligent, sentient animals they keep away from aggressive African honeybees.

Each year in Kenya prior to coexisting with elephants, farmers retaliated by killing as many as 120 elephants for raiding their crop fields.

In 2002, workers at Save the Elephants noticed that elephants steered clear of their important food source, acacia trees, containing bee colonies.

This observation sparked the curiosity of Oxford University zoologist Lucy King. She conceived the idea of creating a honeybee fence, protecting both elephants and crops within small family plots.

King’s original honeybee fence consisted of log beehives suspended on poles beneath a shade-conferring thatched roof with a wire connected to each hive, spaced every 30 feet or so. Elephants hear the hives and keep away from them. If they attempt to push through the connecting wire, hives swing erratically and angry guard bees attack the elephants. Since elephants are intelligent, they learn quickly from these hostile encounters.

Honeybee fences have reduced invasions on crop fields by over 80 percent, and elephant fatalities by farmers have plummeted.

Family farms using honeybee fences also receive extra revenue from selling honey, which is collected at might when the African bees are more docile. Anecdotally, crop yields are up because not only are the honeybees protecting the fields, but also pollinating them.

The bees and humans need elephants since they create water holes for all life. Elephants also make trails, which act as fire blocks protecting both honeybee hives, homes and villages from destruction.

The illicit multi-billion dollar global ivory trade has annihilated African elephants, once 20 million strong now less than 353,000.

It is long overdue that humans respect nature’s flawless blueprint and work with her to coexist on planet Earth – our only home. That means we all need to take less and give more because globally nature is under siege by the human-driven Sixth Great Extinction. We need nature in order to survive. Nature does not need us.

Earth Doctor Reese Halter’s upcoming book is “Save Nature Now.”

A Dying Buzz

Story ran in the Organic Gardener October 22, 2014

For the past decade and a half, climate disruption has battered the Australian continent. Bushfires, prolonged regional droughts, extreme heatwaves and epic flooding are occurring more often and eclipsing records more frequently. And for the first time in the history of the nation, climate disruption is killing billions of honeybees and unknown numbers of the 1600 native bee species, threatening Australia’s food security.

Scientists from Flinders University(1), reported that not only are bees essential for food security, they play a leading role as a key indicator of massive climate disruption blanketing Earth. Honeybees in Australia generate about $6 billion per annum, pollinating almost 70 per cent of food crops, including the burgeoning almond industry that produces over $331 million annually. It requires at least 180,000 hives or about 9 billion healthy honeybees and copious amounts of water to reach these figures. Bees also support $150 million in honey sales and potent medicines for pain relief. However, in a warming world, both bees and water are becoming scarcer.

Almost 700 species of Eucalyptus produce fewer flowers (or not at all) during heatwaves. Those eucalypt flowers are vital for the health and wellbeing for all wild Australian bees as well as the domesticated honeybees. In a normal year Eucalyptus is a major nectar contributor toward 30,000 metric tons of honey, or enough to feed 23.4 million Australians annually. Last summer, plants responded to the stifling heatwaves across the Australian continent by substantially lowering nectar production. Bees require nectar – their only food source – to make honey.

Honeybees also had to contend with another crisis this past summer as climate disruption had their colonies operating in an emergency mode. Bees store their honey in honeycomb cells made of beeswax, which melted because daytime temperatures regularly exceeded 35°C. Instead of searching far and wide for flowers to harvest nectar to turn into honey or collect protein-rich pollen to feed their larvae or performing their role as pollinators, the honeybees spent the lion’s share of each day of last summer searching exclusively for fresh water to cool down their hives. Moreover, commercial beekeepers were forced to feed bees corn syrup in an attemp to keep their hives alive. “Feeding bees in the middle of the summer is just about unheard of,” says Ken Gell of the Central Victorian Apiarist Group. The vicious heatwaves last summer not only cost beekeepers millions of dollars in feeding costs, but also 30 per cent of the commercial bees were wiped out. Honey production across the nation was the lowest ever recorded, and consequently none will be exported this year.

But that’s not all that is troubling bees. The burgeoning worldwide use of insecticides – roughly two billion kilograms annually – is now being highlighted as a major contributing factor to their decline. An estimated 500 billion honeybees have been lost worldwide since 2006. One-third of insecticides are neonicotinoids (neonics), a neuro-insecticide fashioned after nicotine, which poison nerves and prevent acetylcholine from enabling neurons to communicate with each other and muscle tissue. They are a systemic insecticide that penetrates the plant.New research(2) from Harvard University and elsewhere shows that, in combination with climate disruption, neonics are causing bees to die faster than ever before.

Dutch toxicologist Dr Henk Tennekes(3) has detailed the deleterious residual knock-on effects of using neonics in Western Europe, including contaminating fresh waterways, killing trillions of soil organisms and rapidly diminishing biodiversity from meadow birds to raptors like goshawks. Manufacturers say the pesticides are not harming bees or other species. BBC News reported Dr Julian Little from Bayer, one of the manufacturers of neonics, saying: “There is very little credible evidence that these things are causing untoward damage because we would have seen them over 20 years of use.” Nevertheless, Europe currently has a two-year moratorium in place preventing the use of neonics on flowering crops.Researchers from the University of Sussex, in the UK,(4) recently concluded that to save bees globally, neonics must be quickly phased out. One immediate alternative to neonics is the Indian neem tree and its potent natural chemical, azadirachtin. Extracts of neem are effective against at least 200 different insect species but are harmless to pollinators like bees, butterflies, moths, beetles and bats as well as beneficial insects, warm-blooded animals and birds.

In the US, the White House has set up a task force to tackle the massive decline of honeybees. Let’s hope action comes quickly to help save our bees from the dual threats of a warming world and insecticides.

• Dr Reese Halter is a broadcaster, biologist, educator and author of The Incomparable Honeybee & The Economics of Pollination.

References:

1. phys.org/news/2014-05-trio-bee-populations-key-food.html
2. dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2628372
3. disasterinthemaking.com
4. bbc.com/news/science-environment-27980344

Remarkable Bees Need our Help in Sierra Madre

Story ran in Sierra Madre Tattler on August 4, 2013

Our beautiful city of Sierra Madre is known around the nation as ‘Wistaria City’ for the magnificent 500-foot wisteria vine.  Did you know that it depends upon bees to pollinate its dazzling purple flowers?

Let me tell you what else our solitary-, bumble- and honey-bees provide us, and why these magnificent pollinators are so important to our food chain and our quality of life right here in Sierra Madre:

Bees contribute $44B a year to the U.S. economy pollinating crops like almonds, apples, avocados, blueberries, broccoli, cherries, cranberries, cucumbers, grapes, peaches, plums, tomatoes, lemons, just to name a few; alfalfa and clover for beef and dairy industries; and cotton for our clothes.

Honey is to a bee what electricity is for humans – energy.  One teaspoon of honey weighing 21 grams contains 16 grams of sugar or 60 calories, and it took 12 bees their entire foraging lives, combined flying time of about 6,000 miles, to produce 21 grams of honey.   That is an impressive accomplishment, and many ways, these little pollinators do it all for us.

Honey is a powerful antiseptic and renowned for its antibacterial properties. That’s why some modern bandage companies line their products with diluted traces of honey.

Honey is filled with vitamins and minerals including soluble B1, B2, B6, pantothenic and nicotinic acids, vitamin C as well as high amounts of fat-soluble vitamins E, K, and A.  Honey also provides us with essential minerals: calcium, phosphorus, potassium, iron, copper, manganese, magnesium and sulfur.  It is a powerful agent for both adults and children.

Amazingly, bees make glue for their hives from tree resin, mixing it with enzymes in their mouths. This pungent bee glue is called propolis.  Propolis contains potent antiviral, antifungal, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and cancer-fighting compounds.  Propolis is packed with efficacious plant metabolites that scavenge the human body to rid free radicals, keeping us healthy.  Propolis is now being trialed as a co-treatment for prostate cancer.

Did you know that honeybees have a memory, they vote, are being trained to count and are helping people as an early detector of disease by sniffing skin and lung cancers, diabetes and tuberculosis?

Frighteningly, something is going very wrong around the globe in our environment: 20,000 species of bees are showing scientists they are in trouble.  Just 20 years ago across America each of our 2.4 million commercial beehives produced about 100 pounds of honey.  Today they each produce almost half that amount.  In part, their natural diverse forage has been drastically reduced or more likely destroyed altogether.   Bees, like to dine, not dissimilarly to people, at smorgasbords.  Monoculture food crops cannot supply bees with enough nutrition.

This much we do know.  Over the past 110 million years, plants and bees have co-evolved; they depend on one another, when bees die en masse and rapidly all-hell-breaks-loose: Global food security is jeopardized.   Researchers affiliated with the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory at Crested Butte, Colorado recently discovered by removing just one species of bumblebee that one third fewer seeds were produced in Rocky Mountain subalpine wildflowers.

The biggest threat to our bees is in the hands of humans, toxic chemicals.   There’s one class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids with about 1,000 kinds available, globally.  When honeybees are exposed to as little as four billionths of a gram of neonicotinoids they suffer irreparable poisoning.   Many cities around the world today have started to ban the use of these dangerous pesticides in order to help the honeybees and cleanse the environment from toxins.    Not only do pesticides kill our much needed pollinators, bees, butterflies, even birds, but pesticides are a deadly poison for children and adults.

The American Medical Association reports a higher rate of human cancers each year directly related to exposure from various pesticides around the home and office.

This year we should consider ways to make Sierra Madre safer for our bees and all our pollinators.   Organic gardening is one wonderful way to introduce a healthy environment to our children and to our community.  If you find that your yard is buzzing with bees, enjoy them!  Do everything you can to nurture them.

Two weeks ago, the European Health & Safety Authority banned a fourth neonicotinoid, Fipronil . Last week, 36,000 solitary bees were found dead in all 12 nesting boxes on a farm in Niestetal, Germany; poisoned pollen has been implicated. A couple weeks ago, 37 million honeybees died in 600 hives on an organic honey farm in Elmwood, Canada just after corn seed coated in neonicotinoid’s was planted (link). A few weeks before that, 55 American linden or ‘bee trees’ were sprayed with a neonicotinoid (Safari) and 50,000 bumblebees in Wilsonville, Oregon.

In order to keep the bees buzzing it is clearly time to stop pesticides that are known to kill them. If the bees die, we die.

We need The Save America’s Pollinator Act of 2013. I signed the petition and encourage you to do so as well!

Contact: HalterBrothers@gmail.com

Keeping the Bees Buzzing

Bald cypress forests of southern Florida are home for many solitary and bumble bees.

 

Are you aware that honeybees in America generate in excess of $44B in commerce, annually?  I’ve been intrigued with bees all my life. They continue to show my colleagues important new information. Bees are most certainly modern-day canaries in coalmines, worldwide.

Recently, Italian researchers from the University of Trento found that just like humans shake with their right hands, honeybees also greet each other by predominantly using their right antennas. Apparently, the right antenna picks up on certain ‘social cues’ including recognition of their hive mates.

Bee brains might be small but they are packed with about 960,000 functional neurons (compared to 86 billion for humans). Bee neurons enable them to clearly recognize a human face as well as exactly communicate by dancing where food (nectar and pollen), water and tree resin (used along with bee enzymes for making potent anti-microbial propolis or glue) are located as far as 8 miles away.

A team of scientists lead by Cardiff University has just revealed some fascinating secrets of bees’ honeycomb.

Honeycomb is a precise hexagon, six-sided wafer-thin wax that honeybees make from their abdomen, which provides phenomenal strength for storage of honey. Two pounds of beeswax supports 48 pounds of honey! By the way, over a half a century ago the aeronautics industry recognized the strength of honeycomb and adapted nature’s design to enhance the bending and stiffness of aircraft wings, as the wings must support loads of fuel in the aircraft.

It turns out that honeycomb starts out as a circle and gradually forms into a hexagon. The subtle flow of wax is turned semi-molten by the heat of 113 degrees from a special class of worker bees. The wax becomes elastic, stretching like toffee forming a tiny point that becomes a perfect angle within the hexagon. Some incredible physics and math occur in order to form honeycomb.

Frighteningly, something is going very wrong around the globe in our environment: 20,000 species of bees are showing scientists they are in trouble. Just 20 years ago across America each of our 2.4 million commercial beehives produced about 100 pounds of honey. Today they each produce almost half that amount. In part, their natural diverse forage has been drastically reduced or more likely destroyed altogether. Bees, like to dine, not dissimilarly to people, at smorgasbords. Monoculture food crops cannot supply bees with enough nutrition.

This much we do know. Over the past 110 million years, plants and bees have co-evolved; they depend on one another, when bees die en masse and rapidly all-hell-breaks-loose: Global food security is jeopardized. Researchers affiliated with the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory at Crested Butte, Colorado recently discovered by removing just one species of bumblebee that one third fewer seeds were produced in Rocky Mountain subalpine wildflowers.

There’s one class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids with about 1,000 kinds available, globally. When honeybees are exposed to as little as four billionths of a gram of neonicotinoid’s they suffer irreparable poisoning.

Last week the European Health & Safety Authority banned a fourth neonicotinoid (Fipronil). This week, 36,000 solitary bees were found dead in all 12 nesting boxes on a farm in Niestetal, Germany; poisoned pollen has been implicated. A couple weeks ago, 37 million honeybees died in 600 hives on an organic honey farm in Elmwood, Canada just after corn seed coated in neonicotinoids was planted. A few weeks before that, 55 American linden or ‘bee trees’ were sprayed with a neonicotinoid (Safari) and 50,000 bumblebees perished in Wilsonville, Oregon.

In order to keep the bees buzzing it is clearly time to stop pesticides that are known to kill them. If the bees die, we die. We need The Save America’s Pollinator Act of 2013. We signed the petition and encourage you, to do so.

Contact: HalterBrothers@gmail.com

 

How to Make a Backyard Compost

Peppers and tomatoes are easy to grown AND they attract bumblebees as their pollinators

The ABCs of Composting

Composting is easy and inexpensive. It turns almost half your trash into plant food, which can feed your trees, shrubs, flowers and your garden (whether it’s in the earth or pots).

Take your vegetable peels, fruits peels, core or pits, coffee grounds, tea leaves and rinsed crushed eggshells, which are all full of nitrogen, and add them to dry leaves,  plant stalks, shredded newsprint or better still shredded brown paper bags and cut up cardboard. We recommend also adding pet hair, it will help repel rodents.

Backyard

Select a partially shaded spot with good water drainage to place your well-aerated compost bin (which you can either make or purchased from your local gardening store). Be sure to leave at least a foot-and-a half between fences, walls, bushes, doors or windows.

Whenever you add a food layer to the pile  it must be topped-off with equal amounts of shredded newsprint or shredded brown bags, strips of cardboard or we recommend dried leaves (browns).

To encourage oxygen for the beneficial microorganisms leave lots of air space in your bin. We suggest using a pitch fork to mix the contents once every week or two.

Collect dry leaves, storing them in a dry container, so you can add them year-round.

Your compost will be ready within a couple months.

If the pile begins to steam or it stinks — that’s a good sign because the material is decomposing.

Got these problems…

• Compost is too wet and very smelly? You’ve added to many greens, try adding browns and turning the pile with a pitch fork.

• Compost is too dry? You’ve added to many brown and not enough water. Try adding fresh kitchen scraps, moisten the pile with water and cover it to reduce evaporation.

• Compost pile is cold? Try adding some greens.

• Compost pile is attracting critters like racoons or rodents? Likely you’re adding incorrect material and there’s inadequate cover. Use pest/rodent resistant bins. And do NOT add oils, meats, grease or breads to the pile, ever.

• Got fruit flies? Likely your food scraps are exposed. Try putting your kitchen scraps in the center of the pile and cover them with browns.

Do NOT add the following food scarps to the compost: Bread, pasta, rice, sauces, dairy products, nuts, fish, meat, oils, fats or bones.

• Don’t put dog, cat or human feces in the compost.
• Don’t put kitty litter in the compost.
• Don’t put garden weeds with mature seeds in or you’ll inadvertently spread then throughout your yard.
• Don’t put any treated wood products in the pile because they contain harmful chemicals.

Fact: Compost gives your garden far more healthy nutrients than buying a bag of sterilized peat moss.

Did you know? Organic household waste that winds up in landfills decomposes without oxygen and turns into methane — a gas that is at least 70X more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

Want help creating your compost?

Email us: HalterBrothers@gmail.com

Making Honeycomb

Honeybees working on the comb

It takes 66,000 bee-hours of activity to produce the 77,000 splendid hexagonal cells that form the comb of the hive. Almost 20 pounds (9 kilograms) of honey are required for a young worker bee to produce  2.2 pounds (one kilogram) of beeswax. Bees eat the honey and trigger a gland in their abdomen to secrete wax. The bees then chew the wax flakes to soften them. One kilogram (2.2 pounds) of this hearty wax can support 48 pounds (22 kilograms) of honey, or more than 20 times its own weight. Many decades ago, the aeronautics industry recognized the strength of honeycomb and adapted nature’s design to enhance the bending and stiffness of aircraft wings, as the wings must support heavy loads of fuel in the aircraft.

To construct the honeycomb, hair plates at the base of a bee’s neck act as a plumb bob to determine the changing orientation to gravity. When a worker bee turns relative to the Earth’s gravitational field, the pressure of the hair plates on its legs tells the bee which way is up. Without these hair plates, workers could not build honeycomb. When honeybees were transported into outer space on the 1984 Challenger shuttle flight, they were unable to construct honeycomb, due to the lack of gravitational force.

Workers use the tips of their antennae to assess the thickness and smoothness of comb cells, but the exactness of the cell diameters and their orientation is still not explained. Bees construct honeycomb horizontally. Amazingly, chambers are back to back at exactly a 13-degree angle to prevent honey from dripping out.

Interested in more information about honeycomb?

Contact us: HalterBrothers@gmail.com

Medicinal Benefits of Honey

A golden treat packed with Nature’s medicines

Over 2.65 billion pounds of honey are produced each year on Earth. Honey contains over 200 substances. Bees secrete a glucose oxidase enzyme that assists in converting nectar into honey. Along with oxygen, the glucose enzyme splits the glucose molecule into water and hydrogen peroxide. Due to its hydrogen peroxide and glucose oxidase content, honey is a powerful antiseptic. High amounts of malic, citric, tartaric, oxalic and other organic acids combined with the enzymes catalase and peroxidase give honey its renowned antibacterial properties.

The ancient Mayans revered the stingless honeybees, and a thousand-year-old document of theirs, the Madrid Codex, pictures shamans successfully treating cataracts, conjunctivitis, chills and fever with honey-based medicines. With over 80 percent sugar content and its natural acidity, honey creates an inhospitable environment for the single-celled microbes that form infections. The low water content of honey keeps bacteria, which thrive in water, from flourishing. Ancient Greeks and Romans had also discovered these properties of honey; they used honey to treat cataracts and heal open wounds. Some modern bandage companies line their products with diluted traces of honey.

For more information on honey contact us: HalterBrothers@gmail.com