ISLE MADAME, Nova Scotia - “That Looks like an apple tree,” I said to Marjorie. “But how come it doesn’t have any apples?”
Feral apple trees abound in Isle Madame - dotted through the woods, standing gnarled in deserted fields, adorning the edges of roads. They include several different varieties - probably heritage strains, since they apparently descend from orchards planted by French settlers in the 18th century. In October, they should be groaning with apples. But this one, growing beside a long-abandoned road, bore not a single fruit.
Later that day, I drove the five miles from the bridge at Lennox Passage to my house in D’Escousse. Apple trees grow along that road as closely as schoolchildren waiting to cheer a parade - so many, in fact, that I would like to see the dull name “Route 320″ replaced by Route des Pommiers/Apple Tree Road.
But I saw no pommes on Route des Pommiers either.
By now I was curious, and rather alarmed. What about my own fruit trees, the ones that grow around my boat shed, and carpet the ground with little sour apples at this time of year? Local deer-hunters generally phone me in the fall to ask if they can have the apples to set out as deer-bait. But nobody had called this year.
No wonder. Five trees, and between them they had barely produced enough apples to make a pie.
My buddy Edwin DeWolf, who built the shed, drove up beside me.
“No apples this year,” I said.
“No apples anywhere,” said Edwin. “No bees, that’s why.”
Ye gods.
That evening I saw Farley and Claire Mowat, who last month donated 200 stunning seaside acres to the Nova Scotia Nature Trust. This splendid gift includes 35 years’ worth of the Mowats’ careful records and observations on the site and in the area.
“We saw almost no fruits of any kind this year,”" said Farley. “No plums, no cherries, nothing. And it affected all kinds of things. It was a cold, wet, late spring, and we had so few insects this year that the insectivore species of birds didn’t reproduce. The tree swallows and the barn swallows live on flying insects. They made nests, but they didn’t lay eggs and they didn’t stay around. I’ve never seen them behave that way before.”
Was it truly just a cold, late spring - or something more alarming? Bees, I remembered, have been dying off in record numbers right across the United States and Europe, and nobody knew why.
Honeybees are not native to North America, and indigeous North American plants didn’t need them for pollination - but the species that do need them are the ones in the supermarket, the products of industrial agriculture: apples, almonds, cherries, tomatoes, zucchinis, cantaloupes. Theories about the cause of their decline ranged from new pesticides, mites and genetically modified crops to climate change, fungi and even radiation from cell phones.
Whatever the reason, the U.S. problem was serious. Every third bite we eat, says one expert, “is dependent on a honeybee.” In the U.S., the crops pollinated by honeybees are valued at something like $15 billion. The California almond crop alone is worth $1.5 billion.
With money like that at stake, agribusiness doesn’t leave pollination to nature. Bees have been bred to work both earlier and later in the season - and they migrate to where they’re needed. Huge semi-trailers packed with hundreds of millions of bees rumble through U.S. agricultural districts, renting the bees’ services to farmers.
These bees make money, not honey. (Believe it or not, American honey is being undercut by cheaper honey from China.) Industrial bees don’t eat nectar, either. Their food arrives in tanker trucks full of protein supplements, sucrose and corn syrup. It costs $12,000 per load.
“I don’t think the situation in the States is related,” said Farley. “We had extreme conditions this year, including the most rain we’ve seen in 35 years, nearly 40 inches. We also had a lot of fog, and flying insects can’t handle fog.” A biologist from the Nova Scotia Museum later confirmed a “patchy” die-off of bees in some districts of the province.
“It isn’t just the bees,” said Farley. “We had minimal populations of butterflies and moths too, and they came late. It may be several years until insect populations recover, since there aren’t many insects left to breed.”
And what about the swallows?
“They would have gone to where there was more food,” Farley said. “It might be just a few miles inland, out of the fog - but remember, these birds migrate 10,000 or 15,000 miles, so it would be nothing for them to fly a couple of thousand miles to find food.”
The apples of Isle Madame have survived 250 years so far, so I guess they’ll be back. But it’s a very strange autumn without them.
Silver Donald Cameron’s award-winning book The Living Beach is available at www.capebretonbooks.com.
© 2007 The Halifax Herald Limited
FALSE BLOOM AND CLIMATE CHANGE
One reason for no fruit is the temperature flucuation, which happened in many areas of the U.S. in early spring this year. The normal warming was interrupted by a sharp cold period just when the blooms were out in full, killing them off for the year.
An important measure of climate change is the magnitude of short-term variations, not just long term trends.
Of course, ___ someone will explain that it is not the lack of honey bees that is the problem. ____ It’s the temperature flux, or pesticides or whatever.
Well, the lack of bees of EVERY type is the problem, the SUDDEN lack of birds and bees is a warning from Mother Nature and the major reason for their decline is the ammount of DU in the air. We will all find out within two more years that we humans have killed a planet.
Check out the contents of the tanker trucks bringing “bee food”; what are the actual ingredients? Looks like a case of the bee’s gene pool getting too narrow.
There are many other types of bees that can do the work of pollenization. What’s the hype for?
Natural selection is ignored in a domesticated western agricultural culture. We are going to find out why you do not fool with mother nature.
The honey bee has been domesticated and now they have become unable to adapt to changing environments and the stresses of being over worked.
Soon we will have to contend with the super strains of diseases borne from our overly domesticated livestock (saturated with antibiotics) incubated in our children in the form of a flu shot.
Something wicked this way comes…
This has been such a warm fall here in the northeast that I’ve seen spring-blooming trees and shrubs with flowers on them. Also, I live on a lake which has dropped to the lowest level I’ve seen since moving here. Usually the fall rains have filled the lake up after a dry summer, but there’s been little rain this fall.
Alerted to the bee problem a couple of years ago, I’ve been on the watch for any changes. I do a lot of gardening, and have noticed a couple of things. First, I haven’t seen more than a half dozen honey bees this summer, and second, the bumblebees are significantly smaller than usual. I’m not sure if this is a smaller species that is taking advantage of fewer large bees or a change in the bees themselves.
CSIRO scientists autopsy of difficult to find dead bees, discovered blackish brown auto-toxic pollutants. The incidental misuse of herbicide, pesticide and inorganic fertilizers indicate the bees are being poisoned out of existence. Their natural auto immune defenses to disease is being degraded to the point whole specious are becoming extant…
Between rapidly advancing global warming, climate change, over-population, deteriorating bio-diversity and shrinking habitats the bee die-back are amongst the different varieties of ‘Canaries in the Coal mine’ pointing to the next major extinction on planet earth…
It must be a terrorist plot.
Growing up, my Dad used to raise honeybees (side hobby) and I still know one of the local large professional beekeeper (central Wisconsin). OK, a few points to earlier posters.
1) Bee collapse is due to increase in depeleted uranium? Look, I have issues with what we’re doing in Iraq, but where are on earth is your source for that claim? The University of Pennsylvania has done research on CCD, and incidental radioactive material (primarily due to radon & coal-burning IIRC) was looked at and was not a major contributor. Oddly enough, CCD has been less noticeable in China, who has quite a bit of pollutants. Nor has there been more drastic collapse in the Middle East. Your claim would be borne out by severe CCD in Iraq and Afghanistan if it were so.
2) Domestic bees are not adapatable compared to natural bees. Actually, its the opposite. Other than bumblebees, all bees in North America decended from bees the Dutch brought here in the early 1600s. What you call “natural” or wild honeybees are really feral or decendents. Really, almost all honeybees in the world can be traced back to North African bees in Egypt about 4,000 years ago. Bees are not just adaptable, they also evolve quickly (on a DNA, actual evolutionary level).
3) Difficult to find dead bees? Not sure what that means. That die prematurely, perhaps. But (other than over-winter) worker bees live 4-6 weeks. Go to any hive and you’ll find plenty of dead worker bees’ bodies pushed out of the hive. So many that some animals (skunks, when I was growing up) become pests by hanging around to eat the dead bodies.
I do agree, however, with SimonHHH’s opinion (shared by many in the scientific community) that CCD is a symptom rather than the precise cause of the honeybee decline. The underlying cause is likely to be many environmental factors - pollution, weather pattersn (Global Warming), maybe genetically modified crops. Regardless, the honeybee really does serve as a “canary in the coalmine” and its decline should not be ignored.
This ecosystem may recover after some time, maybe in a different form. The main message seems to be the interdependence of the various species. If the insects declined, from climate change local effects, then so did the birds. If the birds remain declined in the area for a long time, the insect population may boom back from lack of predators. There are vast “eddies of instability” in the system, driven by climate change, peoples activities, and resulting changes in neighboring ecosystems. Where can the birds go? Its human takeover everywhere. It happens in so many places at once, with so many species and habitats threatened to disappear forever, a re-evolution of nature can only recur after we humans are all gone.
HABITAT, this MAJOR decline in the honey bees occurred this year. I’ve raised honey bees also and some years we had problems, usually it was a virus or a mold disease.
This year the bee die off was all across the country. In our garden we had no bees of any kind, and there are many different specie of bees that are native to North America. They were not here this spring and fall, along with most other insects, including lady bugs, butterflies, moths etc. That is a subject that has been covered here at Common Dreams on several other strings in the past four months.
We also had a total of eleven different specie of birds this year, instead of the normal 80 to 90 and instead of a hundred or more humming birds, we counted a total of five. Other bloggers from Maine to Washington state have reported the same circumstances, as have the Audabon Society.
What is this serious problem that popped up almost overnight? Is it DU use? Nothing else has been different here in our state as far as weather patterns or rainfall is concerned. We do not have crop farms in Southern Arizona and most of the small farmers are organic and pesticide use is not a factor. We do have a military base which does test fire DU ammo. And the huge ammount of DU used in Iraq and Afganastan does not loiter there, it will traverse the globe in twelve days. In a bunker buster bomb there is over a thousand pounds of DU, a cupful of DU has over five billion microscpopic specks of deadly poison, that will kill anything down to microbes and it will be deadly for ALL life forms for over four billion years. Poison, such ad DDT and DU usually effect birds and bees much faster than it does with humans. Is DU killing the inscects and birds? I don’t know and neither does anyone else. It very well may be the poison that is killing them and if so we have a serious problem and will have it for a long long time.
Few wish to believe DU use is a major problem, that is one reason it is still being used and it’s use is going to kill this planet when the ocean’s phytoplankton die off from it.
Having land out in the hill country of Texas, I’ve noticed a precipitous loss of moths and other insects over the past year. They haven’t disappeared, but have decreased in numbers and diversity. The honeybee may be the tip of the iceberg and simply the most obvious species seen to decline. It looks like most of the flying insects are disappearing. Something is seriously out of balance. GM Foods, cell phones, climate change, who knows. But business as usual is killing us (and every other species).
KILROY has hit a nail, it may be DU, the inscects here are few and far between as are the birds. There have been thousands of tons of DU used since the 1960s and it may be starting to show the results.
We have a hard time facing that there are so many of us and that the old way of our doing things is overwhelming our planet. In my life there are over twice as many people than when I was a boy and we still do things the same way and in fact do worse like factory trawlers wiping out a fishing ground and moving on to another though fewer and fewer remain. Still we do it that way.
A drop of a chemical here and another there and another and another. We test each drop separately and claim they are safe. Take ten thousand different chemical and mix drops from each together and who tests for the effect of those mixtures?
Whether it is chemicals, pecticides, genetically modified crops (and genetically modified pollen), any number of millions of pounds of chemicals or even backround radiation (DU) or cell phone radiation… there are a lot of us doing things the same way and we don’t want to face that we can’t any longer.
What does it take to tell us that too much is enough? The economic inertia that we have built up is resistant to any change. When the fishing ground is depleted we moved on to another until now we use up the last of them though we know that the oceans are becoming empty of fish. You’d think we’d stop but as yet the only thing that stops us is that the fish are gone.
That is the way we have always done things …use them up till they are gone… now we face that there aren’t any more and still we do it like we always have.
It is starting to look like we will continue doing things the old ways till… we are gone? I think we will still be here but the world we knew will be gone.
Lions, tigers and bears …oh my. Oops no room left for them.
Pigeons, squirrels and feral house cats anyone? The Bees go and for the first time people report so were the birds… and what else. We have reached the point of no return and while yet it is still possible to preserve what in fact sustains us all…our economic inertia works ever harder to use up what is left.
It is not that there are too many of us…it is taht we do things the same way as when there were half as many of us and the world can’t take it.
We are headed down an icy mountain road with low brakes… and we just don’t want to slow down… till we see that washed out bridge ahead… and then say “we should’ve slowed down”.
Yeah. The old way of doing things was to use it all up… we are coming to that point where we realize… that we already have used most of it up…
Typically we ignore the most dire of warning signs as if we are getting used to seeing them. A bad sign that. Even when we admit to them, economic inertia makes it hard to stop in time.
As yet we still speed down that road ignoring the warning signs to slow down. We speed past the melting ice caps, the depleted oceans, the chemicals in all our waters, the bees…the apples…the birds… yeah it is so bad yet ask those around you whether they realize it? Turn on rush limbaugh or fox news or listen to bush and be scared. The ‘What me worry’ of mad magazine… will be the biosphere’s … nature as we knew it… epitath.
We will …or our children will…live in what remains. By the end of the decade or so there will be seven billion of us and we aren’t stopping. Another decade and another billion.
Oceans filled with jellyfish and vast dead zones …toxic dead zones but not fish… care for a swim kids? Here you’ll need this new protective body suit…and these goggles … and no you have to take off your filter mask that’s only for use on land… remember don’t get any water in your mouth or on your skin… and then you’ll be all right. Have fun.
Australia is doing well sending bees to the US to restock empty hives. If it is DU then eventually we will be hit just as hard. We had a massive die out of birds in Western Australia that has been linked to lead poisoning and lead is the eventual ’safe’ form once uranium has run out of radioactivity.
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s1824743.htm
Australia also has many native bees. There are worries that importing more European bumble bees for greenhouse pollination could threaten some types.
http://www.zeta.org.au/~anbrc/bumblebeedebate.html
This evening our PBS channel had a good special on the bee situation. Here’s a brief wrap-up: 1) the trouble is world-wide and is killing most pollinating insects (butterflies, moths, etc., not just bees); 2) the bodies of dead bees are filled with viruses (virae?); 3) there seems to be an autoimmune disease afflicting them; 4) pesticides may be causing it; 5) it may have started with Australian or Chinese bees; and 6) no one knows what to do about it although labs all over the world are trying to understand it.
Just so we’re all up to speed on this -
The PBS show was “Nature: Silence of the Bees” and can be viewed here: www.pbs.org
DU alters DNA and harms the immune system of animals. I don’t know if bees fit into that catagory but assume DU could cause problems with their immune systems also. There are other poisons that may be causing the problem, but whatever it is started in earnest this year. I would suspect DU may be the cause, we know the phytoplankton are dying off but don’t know the reason. If those plants die off to 50%, we lose over 30% of the oxygen in our atmosphere. It is not funny at all.
GRANDMA AND HABATIT VIC, thank you for the info.
approx 900 tonnes of DU in Gulf War 1
Approx 1100 tonnes of DU in Gulf War 2
Habitat Vic you have a very good point…
Grandma “5) it may have started with Australian or Chinese bees.”
Here in Australia we don’t have that problem although possibly being viral, Aussie bees might already have built immunity, but if that is the case then the masses of bees that are being exported to the US should be able to rebuild resistant hives.
Australia is often accused of using its strict quarantine laws to bypass free trade agreements for imports. That may be true and it has has pissed off a lot of overseas producers but I don’t care. Let them squeal and caste aspersions as much as they like.
Immune system problems sounds like AIDS. Maybe HIV jumped the species barrier again. It is thought to originally be a monkey virus, so maybe it jumped to insects this time…
this is a link to a very educational article about DU;
http://lonestaricon.com/2006/Archives/09/news06.htm
Where I live, there are lots of bees of several types ranging from tiny black bees to huge yellow, orange, and black bumble bees. I am watching them closely (and expressing humble gratitude to each of them). The bushes in my front yard literally buzz with bee activity. We are still blessed with a multitude and variety of bees. It has also been a bumper year for apples. This is in no way to lessen the message of alarm that bees are disappearing, just a ray of hope that there may be pockets of bees to repopulate the devastated areas, if we come to our senses soon enough (or if Mother Nature takes matters out of our hands via floods, fires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc.)
We of western civilization seem too often categorize/view illness in our culture’s usual compartmental fashion.
There is a simpler and more holographic way to view all the disease in people, bees, butterflies, frogs…
Rather than our current “This disease-that cause” concept, I would propose that disease is imbalance.
The body is naturally self healing and has amazing recuperative resources to restore itself from the stresses and abrasions of daily living. Degradation of any Immune system is a body struggling to provide itself with what it needs to renew it’s health. Whether the imbalance comes immediately from insufficient nutrients, altered food supply, loss of habitat, resource depletion, pollution, contamination, or climate change, the result is the same; Imbalance = illness. Nature teaches that while you can trace something to an immediate cause, it is the entire ecosystem’s balance which determines health.
Today we see Cancers, AIDS, Autism, Heart failure, Alzheimer’s, Mental illness, and so many other conditions, multiplying across the globe - whether in heavily industrialized or rural/forested settings. Granted as stressors multiply - Dis-ease does as well - but rather than isolating this or that as THE CAUSE, humanity needs to see the planet as a whole inter-connected ecosystem that is moving out of balance.
We need to work toward creating/cultivating/investing/exploring what nurtures the health of ecosystems - Rather than always looking for what to blame and eliminate.
Every element on this planet has an equal and opposite element - and we need to direct our future to exploring those dichotomies and using them to balance the whole. While eliminating grossly obvious aspects like pollution and contamination is laudable, so much is already existent in our system that IMHO we would be best served by finding means of neutralizing toxicity and strengthening the planetary “immune” systems.
SIMONHHH wrote, “Approx 900 tonnes of DU was expended in Gulf War 1 and approx 1100 tonnes in Gulf War 2″. The word approx is that given by our ‘trustworthy’ government.
In a single cupfull of DU there will be approx FIVE BILLION specks of deadly ionized DU blowing in the wind. There is a ton of DU In a single bunker buster bomb, we have used hundreds of those in Iraq and Afganastan and have tested hundreds more on military ranges here in the United States and in Australia. Thiry other nations now test DU ammunition, thousands of tons have been expended since the mid 1960s. The DU blown up into the air from a shell or a bomb can traverse the globe in 12 days.
If inhaled, a single microscopic nano-particle of ionized DU may enter the lung or pass directly to the brain where it will bombard cells with radiation over 10,000 times the limit allowed by a chest x-ray. Cancer will result. DU in the body may alter DNA and will also harm the immune system. This is a major problem for children, whose immune systems have not fully developed, many seious medical problems may result, such as those stated by MAINSTAY. DU also kills birds and bees.
The entemologist on the last night’s 60 Minutes segment on bees, suggested we have nowhere near enough data on CCD to draw any sweeping conclusions. Not even enough data to determine whether it is one major or several minor causes. Not enough to determine whether it is the same collection of causes responsible for every colony collapse or different causes are involved.
And my experience is similar to mtnpopulist’s. Here in our yard in SW Florida, I have seen no diminution in pollinating insects, whatsoever. We use no pesticides, and our native plants and shrubs literally swarm with insect life.
Likewise, my degrassed front yard is awash in various bugs, lots of bumblebees and an occasional honeybee. We have seen a decline in honeybees, but overall our insect life is thriving. I am not sure I buy the DU hypothesis, but the best thing we can do is to GET RID OF THE LAWN and plant native species in our yards.
Evidently it depends upon where one lives if there is a serious decline in the inscect populations. For example, the author of this article states there were no pollunting bees where his apple orchards are located. Is he lying? ___ I think not.
We have the same problem here in southern Arizona and on other prior CD articles on this subject, people posted the same thing from areas of Florida to Washington State and every geographical location between. I’m certain no one is fabricating stories on the issue. Some have ample inscects and some have few.
In addition, in the past three months, there have been two articles published here by the Audabon society about the DRAMATIC loss of bird life this year of many species, which we have personally seen to be a fact. Every year we had 80 to 90 different bird specie in our yard and garden. This year we counted a total of eleven specie of birds with only a handful of hummingbirds. There IS a serious problem, the cause is unknown or argumentative.
We do know that in the past two years, DU is being tested daily in large bunker buster bombs, one named “Big Blue” holds 2,000 pounds of DU, when they explode all of the DU is vaporized and becomes airborne, blowing in the wind and deadly for all forms of life and will remain deadly for over four billion years. They are “wonderful” and very effective weapons.
How many have been tested worldwide by thirty nations is unknown by the general public. We will find out someday, just how idiotic this insane spread of atomic waste is and when we find out it will likely be far too late to reverse the damage done. The sad thing is, few care, or are aware of the problems DU is causing. The government of course refuses to even honestly answer it. How could any admit to such a serious crime?
It is impossible to verify the volume of DU munitions used as the military will not tell and Congress has rolled over on the issue as usual. War crimes are now as American as apple pie.
I have read of much higher estimates on tonage than what is being discussed here. The other factor is the nano-size DU particle that results from a DU projectile “burn” upon impact. Once inhaled/ingested the aerosol will affect the immune system and attack DNA as well as being chemically toxic like other heavy metals. Estimates are given that 60% of the projectile is vaporized and can become airborne or enter soil or water. One ballpark figure on the volume of DU released to date it that it may be equivalent to 40,000 Nagasaki type atomic bombs. Any and all species genomes on the planet could be affected. And for what, to steal polluting global warming fossil fuels ?
Also of serious consideration as to a causative factor [inter alia] in Colony Collapse Disorder, is the widespread use of Nicatoid insecticide manufactured by Bayer Corporation. The company denies this, however their own research indicates the chemical directly affects the Bees Central Nervous System, causing memory loss spacial disorientation and auto-toxemia….
Just add that to the aforementioned list of nasties…
nature bats last
Yeah in the bottom of the eight inning and nature is ahead 1,000 to 1.
We should keep in mind it is not only the honeybees in nature that have suffered a dramatic decline. The honeybees quite naturally get the most press as they are an important product which are rented out to farmers in most states and their decline is most noticable.
Hey Kem I got those figures from an Article written by Gordon Prather at AntiWar.com…Maybe he got it wrong too? But I take your point about the atomizing of DU…It’s frightening to think of the long term consequences to the planet’s bio spheric mass…
I wasn’t arguing your figures SIMONHHH, they may be correct, but as JCONRAD wrote, no one of the general public knows the real figure. I suspect it must be far higher than the government states due to the ammount of DU in weapons.
For example, on a single mission of an AC-130 Spectre gunship, twenty tons of DU can be expended. A single 30mm round for the A-10 aircraft gatling gun has 3.5 pounds of solid DU, a tank shell is ten pounds. The shells are not tipped with DU as has been stated years ago, they are solid DU. There is no telling how many tons have been fired on military ranges and the DU used in bombs all burns when they explode, unlike the artillary and cannon shells where about 60% burns. The use of DU ammo is a war crime and the Pandora box is now wide open. We will be very sorry about it someday in the near future.
Hey Kem point well taken…
PS: On a lighter note did you catch any fish on your break?
“The equilavent of 40 thousand Hiroshima bombs have been released into the atmosphere. The amount of radiation included with the emissions from the nuclear power plants have created, according to Dr. Roseleaf herself, the death and mutilation and diseases in 1.3 billion people. It’s had a global effect. What they’ve released since 1991 is the equalivent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. That’s 10 times more than during atmospheric testing.”
DU expert, Leuren Moret.
http://lonestaricon.com/2006/Archives/09/news06.htm
Hi Simonhhh, yes indeed, we did catch a lot of fish and blue shell crabs, ___ ate none. There are large signs along the ocean’s shorlines in some states warning us to not eat many fish, or one flounder a year for example. If only one a year is considered to be “safe” to eat, I’m not eating any.
We had a great time, released the ones we did catch and had beautiful weather, which should not have been the case in late October. You now need a fishing license to fish in the Atlantic ocean or tidal waters in almost every state.
One thing we noted in eighteen states, was the lots for new car dealers were overstocked with new vehicles and few if any buyers or sales people in the showrooms, we were interested because my wife once worked for the largest Ford/Chrysler dealer in the U.S. ____ The depression is near, there are many other signs.
Hey Kem…In response to your “…The depression is near…”
I posted this a few days ago…
US FINANCIAL CRISIS
Video: Asian countries dumping their dollars
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7196
We are in serious financial trouble SIMONHHH and this large increase in the price of crude oil will be another nail in the coffin. The price of gasoline will top $3 bucks a gallon soon and the sky is the limit.
Our son-in-law paid $450 a month for heating their house last year and heating fuel is projected to go up another 20 to 25% this year. That’s a weeks wages after taxes to heat their house. They’ve put a large camping tent in their dining room, closed off the upper rooms and from now until next summer will sleep in sleeping bags. Which I think is pretty smart.
When the depression hits a lot of us will be sleeping in cardboard boxes, so better find some good refrigerator boxes now, becuse in a few months or less, they will be hard to find. You insulate them with newspaper and they’re quite cozy. Buy a solar stove and your’re all set. ___ Oh, water! Find a source of water and have some clorox to purify it. It’s gonna get rough folks.
P/S, buy a lot of candles, you can get good survival candles for 5 cents each at the dollar stores. There will nost certainly be major power outages during the depression. There is a good book available on the net, titled “Possum living” that gives lots of tips about food sources and living on the cheap. If you have a grass back yard, plant it with soy beans and turnips, get a couple of cat traps and you won’t starve.
Kem - What exactly is a “cat trap?” Doesn’t sound very good to me -
It’s a trap to catch cats Gram. The humaine society or local animal control will lend them to you if you report stray cats or skunks. It would only sound good if one was extremely hungry for some Mongolian Bar-B-Q. It tastes like chicken or cat fish if fried.
Kem - LOL on me - after I asked that dumb question I realized you meant catfish trap. And I even come from a fishing family. (However, there are “have-a-heart” traps to catch stray cats and such for the humane society.)
Sounds like you had a good break from all this rabble-babble. Still, watch out for those catfish - they’re bottom feeders and take in all that toxic junk on the bottom.
Hey Kem….make no mistake about it; you made highly relevant comments and good to see you back on deck..
Coming from one such as you SIMONHHH, I humbly accept that as a very nice compliment.
I could not post when we returned, I thought I had been banned. I wrote an E-mail to the Common Dreams editor, he was very nice and was able to fix a computer glitch and get me back on line immediately. The same thing has happened to others, Kathyodat for one. Where are Siouxrose, Aaymon, Coco, Paul M Smith, and many others?
Organic Bees are SURVIVING Colony Collapse Disorder
” Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island…. In a widely circulated email, she wrote:
I’m on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies.”
Check out the link: http://www.celsias.com/2007/05/15/organic-bees-surviving-colony-collapse-disorder-ccd/
Siouxrose, Aaymon, Coco, Paul M Smith, and many others????
The wiretapping might have nabbed them!! They’ve been rendered to some unknown location!! I know I shouldn’t joke about these dreadful state of affairs…