Bees again: finally this problem is beginning to get onto the general radar...

...most likely because it's spring, and beekeepers are starting to discover empty hives...

"Crops -- and our wallets -- may get stung by bee problems"

(Funny how we don't notice till it's our wallets that get stung.)

About one-third of U.S. food depends on animal-borne pollination, and 80% of that is conducted by commercial honey bees. Among the huge range of crops pollinated by the bees are apples, oranges, avocadoes, almonds, carrots and celery -- just to name a few. The Agriculture Department pegs the value of crops pollinated by bees at a whopping $14 billion.

One big cause of trouble over recent years has been the rapid growth and spread of the "vampire" bee mite Varroa destructor. But another, as serious -- if not more so -- and much to the fore this year, is "colony collapse disorder": something causes worker bees to leave their hives and not come back. For a creature built to live cooperatively in a hive structure, this is obviously not a survival-oriented behavior.

[CCD] has swept through 22 states and into Canada, and some beekeepers have lost as much as 90 percent of their hives.

Most threatened are crops -- including Florida oranges, Georgia peaches, Texas cotton, North Carolina melons and many others -- that depend on domesticated bees for most of their pollination.

"This could, indeed, be the 'perfect storm' for pollination services," said Caird Rexroad, associate administrator of the Agricultural Research Service. "With invasive pests and diseases of bees increasing over the last two decades, we may have now reached a tipping point where the bee colony can no longer fight back."

The problem is all over Europe as well. Myself, I'm going to start looking into whether there's a queen breeder in Ireland. Time to start some hives going... since, as one story points out, it's likely that the work of the bees is involved in one out of every three bites of food we eat.

Boy, I bet the shin-kicking's going to really break out over this one...

The Once and Future Republic of Vermont

(Edit: I should mention that Vermont has been and continues to be of interest to me because of family history. Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys -- some of the USA-to-be's earliest freedom fighters / terrorists, depending on which side of the street you're working -- put a price onmy six-times-great-grandfather's head because he spent a lot of time trying to get a significant portion of what would later become Vermont reassigned / reclassified as part of New York. (He owned 64,000 acres of this land, but the records say he "was never able to take possession", which may simply mean he wasn't wild about settling somewhere that a lot of people wanted to kill him.) It looks to me as if his position as a signer of the Articles of Confederation and as Mayor of New York City, as well as the support and good opinion of George Washington and the behind-the-scenes pressure of friends with a lot of power and money, kept him from coming to an untimely end (instead of being buried, old and full of years, in the middle of a whole lot of his own real estate, up near Schenectady).

I could go on about him for quite a while: he was a fascinating creature -- maverick legal talent, early real estate mogul, mover-and-shaker, troublemaker, sometimes politically astute and sometimes a complete idiot. He deserves a book to himself, one which I may or may not ever have time to get around to.

That said: I really like Vermont.