AND PILES AND PILES OF SPINACH

So when I arrived at Riverview today, Oren and Liam were still expecting their order of a forest. Another busy task was at hand though because a local farmer, Steve, needed to collect around thirteen pounds of spinach and had only been able to gather about nine. There are two beds in a hoop house dedicated to spinach and, to help out Steve, Oren ordered Nate (the college-kid wannabe farmer) and me to exhaust the rows of any viable, green leaves. We managed to fill two large bags about halfway with spinach and although I'm not sure if we collected four pounds, they were quite heavy considering a single leaf is seemingly weightless in your hand. I would describe our collection as "a good amount."

While we were rooting through the yellowing leaves of spinach, Liam came across a leaf that was hosting a small colony of aphids. Aphids are these tiny yellowish bugs that almost resemble the dots of butterfly eggs except for their pair of antennae. Aphids are sometimes referred to as plant lice because they can be pretty destructive to the plants they inhabit. They feed on the sap of plants that travels up the phloem in their stems. The phloem is what carries sugar manufactured from the plant's leaves to other parts of the plant that do not conduct photosynthesis, like the roots. So when that sugar is being redirected into the stomachs of aphids, it doesn't bode well for the plant. Here's kind of what the aphids on the spinach leaves looked like

I would also like to mention that I would have not been half as interested about aphids had I not spent the summer at Riverview, in the company of a various assortment of eclectic and populous bugs. I've definitely become quite desensitized to their presence. Anyway, Oren and Liam will probably want to get rid of these bugs- I think Lam mentioned planting some herbs by the spinach would help.

I guess I should mention the trees now. I happen to know the exact figures- 2000 saplings! And each of them needs their own separate hole to call home. Is a certain Louis Sachar book coming to mind to you too?

Oh and lastly, about two days ago, Oren saw a mouse just minding it's own business and probably contributing to the ecosystem in a positive way and wanted to kill it. Mice are an integral part of the food chain in many habitats because they reproduce so quickly and in large quantities and they also control grain distribution by consuming them. I'm not saying you should make any sort of character judgment because of this but...

TREES EVERYWHERE

So. Many. Trees. It’s overwhelming. I don’t think there’s ever been this many trees in one spot in Appleton before. I don’t even know what to do. There are so many.

I can’t give a decent estimate as to how many there are, because I didn’t see them all. The trees are pretty tall, maybe a bit over six or so feet on average.  There’s pear trees, apple trees, peach trees, cherry trees, gooseberry bushes, raspberries, buffalo berries (I have no idea what those are), nantuk cherries (they’re a bush?), frostberries, (whatever those are) and grapes that had really long roots.

Folks at Riverview have spent all day digging holes for them, and making mounds of wet woodchips in the garage to store the ones that can’t get planted yet. It’s going to take a lot of man hours. Luckily, there’s a big group coming out this weekend from Appleton North High School. Kudos to them!

It’s actually very exciting, now is a great time to come to Riverview.  It’s pretty reliably over 40 degrees, the mud honestly isn’t that bad, there’s stuff to do besides painting walls, and, yup, there’s trees everywhere! 

Wednesday's activity revolved around beekeeping. Last year, Riverview had a total of 13 colonies of bees (kept offsite) that were newly started. Unfortunately, 8 of those colonies died, one from starvation, a few from dysentery, some from sudden colony collapse, and some from mites. Tragic.

The contraption was a series of tall drawers that fit about 6 vertical sheets of wood maybe a foot-and-a-half tall. The drawers could be stacked on each other, and pulled out to remove or view the wood inside that eventually becomes layered with honeycomb.

We were taught by Hava and Oren how to sort through the drawers filled with honey comb from the colonies that had died. After scraping off dead bees, mold, and the remains of waste (especially from dysentery afflicted colonies) we assessed the amounts of honey, wax, pollen, etc. and sorted them accordingly.

The sheets filled with honey were put aside for extraction; those with some honey, and some pollen (characterized by the darker color inside the combs) were left to be fed back to the colonies at a later date. Those without very much honey or pollen will be used to make candles from their wax once scraped.

Sometime (tentatively the first Wednesday of May) there will be a city council meeting regarding whether to allow Riverview and other residents or local groups in Appleton to raise bees. With sufficient space and training, beekeeping is completely safe and beneficial—and not just to the beekeepers themselves. Bees are important pollinators and increase crop yields and flower fertilization in up to about a two mile radius of their hive. Plus; a growing concern among environmentalists is the huge decline of bee populations throughout the United States in the wild. Starting colonies which can break off to form new colonies is an excellent way to help remedy this problem.

Bee Decline:
Although most beekeepers and farmers have been aware of it for a long time, it was only in the last few years that the United Nations Environment Program added to the voices cautioning about bee population decline. They note that the declining bee populations in Europe and North America are following a similar trend in China, Japan, and possibly even Egypt and other parts of Africa.

There’s a lot of ideas and theories about why bee populations is declining. Chances are, it has multiple causes that work together.

Insecticides:
According to Michael Wines of the New York Times in an article titled, “Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms” (March 31^st, 2013) The growth of a particular type of insecticide called  neonicotinoids are to blame. The American Bird Conservatory certainly seems to agree as they published a review of 200 studies, many of which were industry research, obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act (I find that added detail particularly interesting. Maybe someday I’ll go more into depth about how that works.) Their meta-analysis called for a ban on neonicotinoids used as seed treatments based on their toxicity not only to birds, but other organisms as well (like bees and other pollinators.)
Also in March, the Environmental Protection Agency was sued for allegedly performing inadequate tests on these pesticides, and approving them despite extremely harmful side-effects. Groups who joined in the lawsuit against the EPA included a coalition of beekeepers and conservation and sustainable agriculture advocates.

Interesting fact: Germany, Italy, and France have all banned the use of neonicotinoids because of their potential threat to bees around the country (the Guardian.)

Another study, published in the Science magazine found that when bees consumed one pesticide, they suffered an 85% loss in the number of queens their nests produced. Another study found that bees exposed to pesticides had more trouble returning ‘home’ meaning they failed to come back from food-foraging trips.
Of course it should be mentioned that companies that produce and sell insecticides claim that when used correctly, there are no ill effects causing bee mortality and they have their own studies they use as backing. But environmentalists and others argue back that those studies are not in the public domain, cannot be scrutinized or peer evaluated, and are therefore not as convincing as other studies.

Too Few Flowers:

There’s some concern that the loss of flowering plant species might be responsible for some of the bee decline. I did not find any studies either affirming or negating this (it is a pretty hard cause to set up an experiment for, I would imagine) but it’s a great excuse to plant more flowers. Just about anything would be helpful.

Varroa Mite:

The Varroa Mite is a parasite which possibly might give beekeepers a fright keeping them up at night. Mites get into the cells of bees, preferably drones, and suck the ‘blood’ of the bees, weakening them. From there, they rapidly reproduce and spread and infect the rest of the colony. Studies have found that bees infested with the mite are more susceptible to CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder, for a quick refresher on what that is, refer to Jaffna’s last post) and infection.

Air Pollution:

Air Pollution is another factor that could be affecting bee populations. According to a study by the University of Virginia, air pollution might mess with a bees ability to ‘smell’ and find flowers and thus food. Pollutants such as ozone (smog) and nitrate radicals, often released from cars, can bind with ‘scent’ molecules and inhibit their ability to smell sweet. If bees can’t find the plants and flowers with nectar, not only does it hurt their hive, which might suffer from starvation, but it also has a huge impact on plants. Unfortunately, unpollinated plants can’t reproduce, and there are less flowering plant next year. Which leads to horrible cycle of less bees, less plants, etc.

It’s hard to tell people not to use their cars, but perhaps it’s best to be mindful and drive efficiently, carpool when you can, and ride your bike as much as possible. Don’t have a bike? Volunteer at Riverview this summer and you can take part in their earn-a-bike program! Guess what?! You’ll earn a bike!

Bee Importance:

The bees are needed to pollinate crops that feed the world's growing population. Of the 100 crop species that provide 90 percent of the world's food, more than 70 are pollinated by bees, according to  the UN.

Achim Steiner, the executive director of UNEP (United Nations Environmental Program) said: "The way humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century. Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less dependent on nature's services in a world of close to seven billion people".

So spread the buzz!

Sources!

norfolk honey (picture)

beeguardian.org

Michael Wines of the New York Times

The Guardian

UNEP (United Nations Environmental Program)

Science Magazine

University of Virginia

Oren but mostly Hava

An unceremonious funeral

Knock! knock!

Who's there?

Honey!

Honey who?

Honey. Collected from the combs of five hives whose winged inhabitants succumbed to the cruelties of survival and whose bodies were now being ruthlessly scraped into heaps on the ground in order to collect the last of their livelihood from their hives. 

If you laughed, I would seriously recommend getting an x-ray of your heart, you know, just to see if its there. 

Today at Riverview, Mira and I were put to the task of cleaning out the trays of honeycomb used by the tragically deceased hives. A rather casual autopsy was done by Oren, who concluded that one of the hives had died of starvation (because the bees were found burrowed into the honeycomb,desperately trying to find food of some sort) (do you realize how sad this is? This would be like finding a body halfway into an empty fridge or cupboard), one or two had lost a battle with a bacteria that caused dysentery (which can happen if the hive experiences a drought- like the one this summer) and one was also speculated to have possibly been choked by the freezing fingers of winter (because the bees were found clustered together). Especially intriguing were the last two hives, which were not filled with carnage like the others. With only fifteen or so bodies within the combs, Oren speculated that these bees had gone through COLONY COLLAPSE.

"What's colony collapse?"

Prepare yourselves my friends, because it's a panic unlike any other. More imminent than economic collapse if we continue our current governing strategies. More powerful than the supernova of a collapsed Red Giant. More shocking than an earthworm with a collapsed lung (fact: earthworms do not have lungs). It's sudden. Unexplained. A mystery.

I hope you didn't get too worked up because this may be a disappointment.

A colony collapse- or if you want to sound medically educated, Colony Collapse Disorder, or if you want to sound educated and cool, just straight up C.C.D- is when a colony of bees abandons their hive for no obvious reason. Apparently, unexpected desertion like this is common. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, one third of all colony losses have been attributed to CCD. That's not a good statistic for the bees or the beekeepers. There are actually researchers who have tried to pinpoint possible causes of CCD. Though none are currently supported by definitive evidence, there are four main focuses suspect to the crisis: 

Pathogens: though no specific one can be attributed to the total occurrence of CCD, there is correlation between hives infected with viruses and hives that eventually collapse. 

Parasites: Along with the absence of bees, another common indicator of a collapsed colony is the presence  of mites, specifically the varroa mite (I think Oren mentioned a hive that had mites?). Researchers believe that these parasites may transmit viruses that affect the colonies and cause CCD.

Bad Management: Stress brought on by long journeys of migration and overcrowding in artificial hives has also been thought to cause CCD. If this is the case, beekeepers of malpractice need to hang their heads in shame, have flour, butter, milk, and sugar stuck to their legs, be squeezed into an averaged-sized kitchen with a hundred other people, and forced to make bread all day (and then have half of their labor eaten by individuals of a "superior" species without profit). Don't worry, the hives at Riverview were not abused.

Environmental Stressors: Also our fault. This could include having bees exposed to pesticides or having access to pollen of a limited diversity or low nutritional value. Living near contaminated water could also be another factor. 

Currently, the consensus is that it is probably the perfect mix of assaults from above that bombard a weak hive at a vulnerable time.

And as I've come to learn, bees are quite vulnerable.

Hava, a really smart girl (maybe even smarter than Oren) who often helps at Riverview and is a student at Lawrence (and Lawrence's first beekeeper), informed us about bees and their ease of becoming susceptible to disease (not as good as Mira's poem but hey, I try). See, bees, like the offspring of generations of incest, do not have a lot of genetic diversity. This makes them have a weak resistance to a lot pathogens, if they penetrate the hive's walls. I'm now going to make another, seemingly digressive comment about Hava, that will actually directly transition into another main point quite smoothly. Hava has a great vocabulary. Today, she used the word "fastidious" and though I never learned it's meaning for the SAT, I will always remember it now because, when used to describe bees, it characterizes them as nature's innate germaphobes. Hava explained that, while they lack internal immunity, bees create environmental immunity by keeping their hives in tip-top shape via the removal of parasite-infected larvae and constant, fastidious cleaning. 

While we were excavating the combs, Mira and I noticed that, while some where filled with the recognizable honey-colored yellow we associate with the food, others were combs of sticky blackness. Hava said this colored honey might be from buckwheat nectar. Rachel mentioned this to us earlier this summer as well- the color of honey depends a lot on the type of flower it's nectar is taken from. The well-known colored honey in most commercial products is clover honey, which is popular for its sweet taste and light texture. Buckwheat honey is less sweet, but loaded with antioxidants and helps boost immunity (apparently you can use it as natural cough syrup as well). When I was in France, most of their honey was Chestnut honey- which has an almost reddish color. Apparently there are over 300 different types of varietal honey in the U.S. alone. Do we even have that many ice-cream flavors?

We don't get to talk to Hava often but it was nice to have a conversation with her today, and I sure learned a lot- look at the size of this post!     

The Incoherent Synopsis of April 16th

Some days anything you say or write ends up sounding scrambled and goofy, so it seems just as well to embrace it and enhance it by attempting to write some poetry. Which is what I did. I caution anyone reading this that all the rhymes were forced, there is very little standardized syllable count per line, and at places I digress from whatever point I originally intended to make and rambled on about something that might seem unimportant. Can we all agree to name our kids something that has at least one other rhyme in the english language? Hmm, I suppose it's a bit hypocritical of me to complain about that though.

Today was pretty muddy, which was sort of cruddy,
but not really, for I had a buddy!
The hooligan Jaffna, whose name literally rhymes with nothing.

Anyways.

It was rather chilly, so we felt rather silly,
for not dressing warmly, much less uniformly.
But we tied down some plastic,
with twine, how fantastic!
So we were in part successful,
despite the weather being stressful.
And then we went inside,
before our fingers died.
Because it was exceedingly cold,
Turtles can live to be really old.
Or so I've been told.
I  haven't actually ever met one.

And then we were enlightened,
and thus our day was brightened,
with lots of information
regarding herbaceous sensations!
Who knew lavender could
make tea that tasted good?
Or that when stuffed in pillows,
caused aromatic billows
and freshened up the room,
with a smell not unlike a bloom?
My life is more complete,
ain't that neat?

Saturday the 13th

Saturday the 13^th at Riverview. Yes, I am writing this on Sunday when I finally got around to it, but never fear, the details are as fresh as a eighteen month old twinky in my mind.

First of all, it was amazing how many cool volunteers showed up. I think they were all kids attending Fox Valley Tech but I’m not entirely sure. There were far too many to all do one thing so we split up into groups. In my group, we planted things! With me were Dariela, a foreign exchange student from Honduras, Won, from South Korea, and Katelyn, from somewhere else in Wisconsin, why can’t I remember? Oh well. So first we all planted a 500 cell tray of Sedona FI onions. That was tons of fun. 2000 onion plants right there.

Then we planted the last of the shallots, some Italian flat leaf parsley, and two different types of peppers. And believe it or not that took us about two and a half hours!

Some friendly neighbors came over and fed us cookies sometime in the middle of all that which was very nice of them even, and Sarah the seed-saver took cuttings of some pussy willow and distributed it to what I think were her relatives?

Tuesday, April 9h

“I tell you I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different”

Reading things by Kurt Vonnegut is pleasurable, provides a refreshing perspective, and makes one’s life more meaningful. Just like Riverview. [Yup, that phenomenal transition right there was completely original.]

Did you know that there’s a bunch of goofy little plants at Riverview (and doubtless elsewhere) that just keep growing taller and taller instead of wider and leafier. Honestly, back in the good ole days plants didn’t do none o’ this type o’ shenanigan, no sir, they just grew up prim and proper like teapots and salad forks. By golly.

Why do they do that? First, perhaps, we should talk about light and plants. Plants like light, they need it to grow. In the wild, light is a limited resource and plants must compete for it. If you’ve ever left a potted plant in the same spot by the window for a few months, you’ll have noticed that when you look at it again, it seems lopsided. The parts of the plant that have grown most are those with the best access to sunlight. The tendency of plants to grow towards light is called phototropism.

Growth of plants is controlled (like so many other things in life) by hormones. Specifically, the hormone auxin. Where there is auxin there shall also be growth. The concentration of auxin within a plant allows plants to exhibit, in addition to phototropism, the also convenient and beneficial hydrotropism and geotropism. 

Hydrotropism is when a plant grows towards a higher concentration of humidity or moisture, and geotropism is when plants grow in either the same direction of gravity (roots) or the opposite (stems.) They might not be recognized by spell check, but I assure you they are words. 

Let’s pretend for a second that seeds are sentient***. So a seed is in the ground, it senses moisture so it decides to germinate. It senses gravity and orients itself sending its roots down and its stem up. And it’s thinking about budding out into a leaf or two, but it can’t sense any light. Perhaps, thinks the seed, there is a larger plant blocking it and it needs to be taller before it can spread out a leaf that will get some sun. And then it enters this loop and keeps growing up at a rapid pace.

But, jokes on you plant, there wasn’t anything in your way, I just left you in the dark too long. And now you’re awkwardly tall and if you make some leaves you’ll just tip over and die, and you can't really just keep growing, and you can't shrink and then grow leaves. You're as hopeless as a lactose intolerant earthworm searching for nourishment in the South Pole.

Hopefully the daily occurrence of nighttime won’t be long enough  for this process to happen.  Hopefully, though evolution, plants have come up with a way to avoid that. Or maybe it was cloudy, or they were in the shade too much, but for whatever reason, we have got some leggy plants. 

Solutions? We'll just have to be extra careful that the finicky varieties get bright light while germinating. For the ones already too leggy, we can try replanting them deeper, covering up part of their stem. Or we could let them die. 

***I mean no disrespect to Jainists when I imply that plants are not sentient.