Another Salmon farm is Quarantined

Again we hear news that Salmon has been infected with a disease. Its sad that the salmon may be dying off even if the disease does not affect humans. I wonder if the disease is natural or if the environment of the salmon farm is what is fostering the disease. I want to know if people think that the farms are what are causing the disease. I also want to know if getting rid of the farms will help the salmon become more healthy. I suppose that salmon weren't tested for diseases as often as they are now that they are in captivity, so I wonder if they had these diseases before.

Pesticides turn bees into picky eaters

This article talks about how neonicotinoids affect the bees negatively. They say that the bees only want nectar that has a higher sugar content. This phenomenon reminded me of obesity in humans. They only want sugary food. They dance less or not at all and they have decreased memory. Just like in humans. This pesticide may be one of the factors to the decrease in honey bees and this is alarming because we need bees for almost every aspect of living.

Sygenta settles herbicide lawsuit

I think that this is ridiculous, Sygenta was able to get out of any responsibility just because they paid for the damages that they caused. I wish that they had lost the case instead of settling because now no one will remember what happened and if it happens again it will look like a one time thing and that they didn't know of a problem before it happened. I am glad that the people affected are being reimbursed for their damages but I am upset that Sygenta will still be able to sell their chemicals.

Bee Keepers Prepare to sue EPA

I am torn I want to believe that the pesticides are what are killing the bees, but I have a feeling that it won't be that easy to find the answer to the loss of bee's. I think that in all probability there a several factors and one of which may be the use of pesticides. So while I want to side with the people suing the EPA I also understand that big farms need to use some sort of pesticide or they will not be able to make the money they need to survive. It is too easy to paint all pesticides with the same brush and label them all as evil when they definitely play a part in our need for food. As the population grows we have a greater and greater need for more and more food. If we lose all of our crops to insects we fall farther and farther behind in what we need for the masses. I think that one has to look at both sides when considering this issue. Many studies have been done on if this pesticide harms bees and so far it has been proven that it has not. I think that for the time being it is better to use the best pesticide that we have rather than use nothing. But I also think that we need to try and find better alternatives for the future and that we need to find out what is killing all our bees because without them there is no us.

Finishing Queen Cells

This article is basically about how to take care of your growing queen's. You may need to feed them and you have to be careful that you don't tip the frame or cause vibrations because this will upset the larva. The rest of the article just talks about where to place the unhatched queen cells and what to do after they have hatched. Personally I would only create a queen cell after the old queen has begun laying irrationally or the hive has become too big and I want to split it.

Using Extra Queen Cells

This was a rather short article. There are three ways to use the extra Queen's. 1. Give to a friend 2. Mate 2 queens and sell one 3. Freeze the extra queen's and let them sit in rubbing alcohol for a few months and use this as a swarm lure Overall I think that all three are good options and that they take relatively little time and work. If you have no use for your queens you can give them away, if you want to sell or split a hive you can have two queens and if you don't want to clip wings this might be a good alternative.

Clipping and Marking Queens

One way to mark the queen is to use a Baldock cage which is pressed into the comb and traps the queen behind a layer of mesh. This is the easiest method but a few pupa may be killed. There is a colour scheme : White for years that end in 1 or 6. Yellow is used when a year ends in 2 or 7. Red if a year ends with a 3 or 8. Green when 4 or 9 is the last digit. Blue if the year ends in a 5 or a 0. Instead of paint a coloured disc may be used. But this is far harder than paint. This article also talks about how to clip the wings of the queen. You need to make sure that she has sperm or she will not lay and so it is best to clip her right after she starts laying. The point of clipping her is so that she doesn't swarm. Some other helpful hints are to wash your hands in alcohol between queen's, use a match stick so the paint can penetrate the hair layer and do not clip a virgin queen because the hive may think her defective and replace her. This seems like a complicated way to prevent a swarm and I would rather use one of the methods that we used in school.

Starting Queen Cells

This article talk about the different ways that one can make a good environment for a queen cell. The miller method which is using new wax and making spaces so that queen cells can be made. You could also use used comb for this method. And the Ally method where 2 day old larva and moved to queen cells with some room between them. The miller method looks easier and it sounds a lot like what we did where we put queen cells on the bottom of the frame but I think that we also took 2 day old larva and put them in the queen cells. Though I wasn't at that class.

Salmon Virus

This article was about how there is a virus called salmon anemia and that it may be found in our BC fisheries and the salmon fish farms. This is a scary article because we eat a lot of salmon in my family, even if it won't hurt humans it would be sad if we ran out of salmon because they were all dying of because of salmon anemia. But on the other hand no one could really confirm that this is what was happening here because the samples were degraded and the salmon were not confirmed to be from a BC fishery. I would like to think that we are not causing this disease and that the salmon will continue to live in our rivers but it is helpful to read everything we can and make sure that we protect our salmon in any way we can.

Developing nations may be more obese

This article was about how the developing social and economic conditions in some countries may be leading to obesity This was an interesting article, and it proved a number of things that I had previously thought. In Canada and the US poor people are more likely to be obese because healthy food is more expensive and healthy food takes longer to make and it is easier to go to McDonald's. But in developing countries any food is expensive and if you can buy enough to get fat then you must have a lot of money. It's part of the culture to be bigger but it may be bad for their health. It is definitely something to consider when taking into account how to change the health of the world. In developed countries healthy food needs to be cheaper and in developing countries the idea of wealth needs to be shifted so that being overweight is no longer the ideal.

NO CORN DIET

In this day and age it is so hard to avoid corn, I have made a menu of some things that one can eat in a regular day that do not include corn.

Breakfast

Pepperidge Farm Bread and Butter
(this brand and Nature's Own and Sara Lee are all free of corn syrup)
and Kashi cereal and milk

Lunch
A salad for lunch that included lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber but that excluded meat because most meats are corn feed

Dinner
Pasta and Ragu sauce
(Ragu is all free of corn syrup)

Desert
Ice Cream
(Breyers and most Ben and Jerry's are High fructose corn syrup free)

It is best to avoid packaged foods and fast food as a lot of these items include corn in some way.There are some alternatives for your favourite foods that don't include corn syrup, such as chocolate (cadbury) and some lesser known sodas. It is hard to do but it may just be worth it in the end.

Climate Change conference

I wasn't sure what to write before the conference so I decided to wait so that I could write only one post instead of two. The keynote speaker was interesting and I really enjoyed that he had met Rick Mercer. His speech was informative but I thought like with all the sessions that it was a little too short. My first session was with Marc Lee I didn't like that he was from the same company as Seth Klein, it felt like only one side of the argument, when a bunch of different agencies present their side it is easier to believe. After that we went to system change not climate change with Harjap Grewal, I really liked him, he made his workshop interesting and informative. We had time to have a discussion and he actually taught me things I hadn't previously known. Lastly I went to the Mining workshop, it was interesting and really sad but we watched a half hour long movie that was all in Spanish and it was hard to read the subtitles because they went by really fast. Overall the speakers were good but I felt like they didn't have enough time to do everything that they wanted to do. I think that I would really have liked to meet Ben West the Tankers and Pipelines speaker because he does film and poetry two things that I also enjoy. It would also have been nice to go to the Fossil Fuel Extraction in BC workshop because I had no clue what fracking was and I had to look it up, but even that did not really clear it up for me. I would have liked to have heard what she said.I found the lunch strange but when I spoke the my mother she said that raisins in rice was something she grew up with. After lunch we took a tour of the garden which was amazing, they are so inspirational at windomere and I would really love to try some of the things that they do there, like the compost bins in the hallways and the aquaponics system. After the conference I was talking about it for days with my parents, eventually it got on their nerves but I would really like to try the worm compost though my mom would never let it tin the house. On a side note I went to the Library recently and found two books, one was called Urban Agriculture and the other one was a book about bee's that David Suzuki put on his book club list. Of course I had to take them out, even though I haven't had the time yet to read them.

Big Organic

This article was hard to read because it was sideways and I couldn't figure out how to turn it right side up. I find it ridiculous that people can want labels that give a story. I want to know the facts about the food not how the animal lived. I think that a big part of organic is people saying what they think that people want to hear and not necessarily what they believe in. I want to really know where my food is coming from. I don't want the story book version I want to go to a local farm and see how they do it first hand. I think that organic is to overpriced and that a lot of it is not really what we think of as organic. I think that there are a few farmers that are doing it the "right" way and a whole bunch of others who are just pretending that they are. Organic farming is better for the animals but by how much as Michael Pollen says, is there life really any better than those of normally farmed chickens. I find it hard to believe that organic is greater in any large way.

Elixirs of Death

I did not know that insects were lab rats in WWII to see if chemicals were deadly to humans. That is a sobering thought because if the pesticides we use kill insects what do they do to us? Arsenic is deadly to humans but still arsenic spays are used to kill bugs. This seems a little counter intuitive. If we are spraying our food with poison to keep it alive are we really saving it? There is so much propaganda surrounding the DDTs that no one can really know all the facts. There have bee lies spread from the very beginning. Chemicals are very harmful things but because you grow up with them around all the time they seem less deadly. You know you don't want chemicals but when you do have them on your food they don' seem to have any effect. This is because a lot of chemicals are stored in the fats and are passed on , they have few if any obvious signs. There are so many harmful chemicals out there that a lot of people have never heard of but that have serious effects. The chemical Endrin can cause vomiting, convulsions and brain damage. Many of these chemicals are seriously harmful but few people know about them. I was shocked to learn that there were so many types of pesticides and I didn't recognize most of them, I was also not aware of the effects that they could have.

DDT

I think that DDTs are bad and should not be used. It is not a black and white case though. It does kill mosquitoes which carry the malaria virus which is of course a good thing. But it also has a negative effect on the environment and other organisms that have been affected by DDTs. Such as birds who lay eggs with softer shells. I think that it is possible to make another pesticide that does not have a negative harm on the environment. Humans are not the most important organism in the world we have to consider all other living things before we make such radical decisions. If we were to cure malaria instead of getting rid of the mosquitoes we would not hurt anyone and we would no longer have an epidemic. If DDTs live in the mothers milk it is passed down from generation to generation. It accumulates in the species instead of dissipating. It will take a very long time if it ever leaves the system of a species. It might be helpful in Africa where they could use malaria prevention, but it would hurt the species in Africa as much as it would help the humans. DDTs are not necessarily bad but they are not all good either. The risks need to be weighed before anyone takes any action.

Raw Milk :History

Raw milk is a scary thing, and I'm glad that I have only ever had pasteurized milk. But I do not think that raw milk is evil. My Oupa liked on a farm and he used to drink milk from a cow the way that we drink water from a hose. I think that it all depends on how we do it. I can't believe that there is a link between TB and raw milk. That is not something I would have guessed before reading this article. My mother is a strong believer that people should not drink cows milk, that it is wrong on a fundamental level. It is scary that so many diseases came from raw milk. I also believe that in the past thinks were more sanitary, but progress happens for a reason.It is probably better that milk is pasteurized even if some people would like to drink raw milk. I did not know about the links to diseases like TB and I would like to know exactly how that works, what is it that causes TB in patients who drink raw milk.

Raw Milk : Legal Battle

I think that it is ridiculous that people are not allowed to transport raw milk. You are allowed to buy it you just can't bring it home. I am upset at how rigid our system is in Canada. I think that you should let people do what they want if they are not hurting anybody. Who cares if people transport raw milk. I would like to follow up on this man and see if he ever gets to meet with Premier McGuinty. I think that there should be farms where they produce raw milk. If they do it by hand a lot of the diseases that are transmitted by machinery with not be applicable. I think that raw milk need to be seriously tested and there needs to be measures put on it so that children do not become sick, but if adults know the risks I think that they should be allowed to buy raw milk.

Myths about Organic Produce

I was really upset that organic uses pesticides. That is one of the major reasons to buy organic. I am happy that there is produce that does not use pesticides but I think that organic should all be pesticide free. It is really important to make sure that all organic products are as healthy as they can be, that's what people pay for. I don't like that all that matters is where the pesticide comes from. That has no effect on if it is toxic or not. What is the point of buying organic food if it is not healthier, besides environmental gains. How does it benefit me to eat organic food. It is more expensive but it is no healthier. Also it is not all that much better for the environment. I believe that the article said that organic farming is not using GMO's and I don't want that I don't think that you can modify somethings DNA and have be perfectly healthy. I think that its a good idea to not use GMO's and I am fully in support of that practice. I think that it might still be a good idea to buy organic because they are probably a little better than regular produce but I can't imagine that it would be by much. I'm not sure that it is worth the extra cost just yet. When the practices become more "organic" I think that it will become a better choice, but right now it is about even, though leaning toward the organic side.

Neonicitinoids

The worlds food supply is in serious danger. It is disgusting that the pesticides live in the seed. It travels and effects all part of the plant. Therefore it effects all animals that eat the plants. The EPA decided that they would release the pesticides even though they knew that it was toxic to honey bees. Because they did not do field studies, it was not confirmed and therefore it was not known that it would hurt bees. It was scary to learn that the pesticide company's so their own studies and the present it to the EPA instead of the EPA doing the study. The company's are making the studies lean in their favor no matter what happens to the bee because they want to make money. It is sad that the EPA accepts that the studies that they do are real. It is also not open to review so other people can not redo the tests and see if they get the same results. It is sad that the EPA feels that need to cover up the effects of the pesticides. Its scary that the pesticides stay in the soil, and may have long term effects. The EPA knew about the possibility of CCD but they are saying that they are not sure so it doesn't matter. In England they think that it does matter so they are doing further studies. The EPA decided that a label is good enough. It says not to use it around bees. But that doesn't really work because they stay in the soil and the plants and it gets pollinated throughout the food chain.

Vanishing of the Bees

I was not able to find the movie in time though I would still like to watch it at a later date, I watched the trailer and I did a little research so that I would at least have something to talk about in my blog post. I already knew that bees were essential to life because they pollinate our plant. It is a scary thought that the bees are disappearing. I would like to know what is really killing our honey bees though I suspect that we will not know for sure for many more years. A colony of bees was wiped out in three hours, the implications of that are staggering. They are simply vanishing.
Usually bees will take over a hive that is empty but these hives are sitting empty and other bees wont even look at the hive. This probably means that there is something wrong with the hive or they are afraid of what will happen to them is they take over the hive. Colony collapse is happening all over the world. There are many theories of why this is happening, including cell towers, pesticides and varroa mites. None of these have been proven, actually most of the theories have bee dis-proven.It is a scary idea that the bees can disappear and we don't know why.
I will update this post after I have seen the movie.