I’m only a year late spotting this: Suggs is a beekeeper…   Read the full story at http://www.premisesstudios.com/blog/suggs-and-the-premises-launch-urban-beekeeping-campaign/

Źródło: Beekeeping Madness

Źródło: Fluid

I had on a veil and jacket. I also had on gloves because my hands were stung in the swarm hive (queenless and angry with my intrusion).  Jeff just had on a jacket and veil as well. He helped me lift off the second box (also heavy but with brood as well as honey), and again we tore up drone brood between the boxes.   Jeff had company who came to see the new grand baby, and wasn’t expecting to work the bees with me, so I encouraged him to go be with his guests.

Meanwhile I was using hive drapes and smoke but these bees were so unhappy. Suddenly I realized at least three were inside my veil. I walked away from the hive and killed at least one of the bees inside the veil by pinching her, but not before I had been stung three times.

Why didn’t I just stop the inspection?

This was a day when I could work the bees, the temperature was finally right, and the drone brood between the frames pointed to a need for space. These bees are going to swarm unless I really work hard to keep them contained and I knew one way would be to checkerboard the brood box to expand the brood space.

So….I put on my Golden Bee suit – just happened to have it in the car. My friend Julia had been using it until she got one of her own and had conveniently just returned it to me. I think I’ll keep it in the car on bee visits!

I took a new box with a few drawn frames and some strip frames and went back to Colony Square,  waiting for me, draped but angry. The bottom deep had brood in it, but I needed to do this with medium boxes. The next box (#2) had brood as well, so I checkerboarded it with the new box I brought with me.

I completely forgot about the swarm hive and did not pull a frame of brood and eggs for it.

Checkerboarding means that in Box #2, frames 1, 3, 5, 7 were left with brood in them and frames 2, 4, 6, and 8 are now empty comb or undrawn frames. In Box #3, frames 2, 4, 6, and 8 are brood frames moved up from Box #2 and frames 1, 3, 5, and 7 are now empty comb or undrawn frames. This expands the brood nest as per Michael Bush (he calls it unlimited brood nest) and gives the queen more room to lay.

You can only do this if the hive has enough nurse bees to keep the brood warm and this hive is bursting at the seams…so no problem there.  Next Sunday, if the weather is good, Jeff and I are going to make two nucs from this hive.  

This is how the hive looked almost an hour after I was done….and it’s February!  This hive is bound to swarm unless we do something.

Źródło: Happier Bee News on the Old Home Front

Źródło: Bill Owens Speaks to the Metro Bee Club

Źródło: Pick myself up, Dust myself off, and Start all over again…..

You can see the full list of attendees here–it’s a really fascinating bunch.  To name check just a few:  Wired. BoingBoing. Nature. Science. Ed Yong. Carl Zimmer. Museums. And, uh, independent blogger/social media types like me.  And so here I am, feeling like a little bug scuttling among giant writers. And I discover…that people actually read my shit. And know who the hell I am. Whoa.

Everyone was geeked about science and about communicating science.  IT WAS AWESOME.  But Why was it so awesome? I think Ed Yong nails it in his summary–we “knew” everyone before we arrived. Even though I hadn’t ever met 447 of the 450 folks attending in meatspace, I had chatted with them online, commented on their blogs, and read their books. From further discussion in the comments from David Dobbs:

“The steady message, via the unconference idea, that it’s a relatively level playing field — or, as someone put it on Twitter, that it’s not experts and non-experts, but different people all bringing different experiences in areas we’re all interested in. It’s a steady insistence that it’s not a producer-consumer model, with the audience full of consumers, but rather a conversation.

The other key, it seems to me, is that it’s a fairly balanced mix of mainly-scientists and mainly-journalists/communicators, so it’s not a single peer group, as it were — not a single discipline. There’s always this chemistry of excitement, of mixing with another tribe. To me that’s an important part of what distinguishes ScienceOnline. And I think it helps create the sense of humility and egalitarianism: Prominence in one area doesn’t make anyone top dog at this conference, because even the most distinguished people in one area are among not just their own discipline’s peers but amid those of another discipline in which they have little expertise or distinction.”

Just before I went to ScienceOnline, I read a book called Cognitive Surplus.  And it kind of blew my mind.  Shirky’s central thesis is that the web and the relatively large amount of leisure time in the first world (i.e, time not spent working for the man, or raising our food) has created an amazing opportunity.

We kill a lot of that free time in very unimaginative ways.  Americans spend 200 BILLION hours each year watching television. What if all that brain power was directed toward something?  Shirky posits a surplus of creative energy exists, and is only beginning to be tapped.  For example, take the humble LOLcat:

“Formed quickly and with a minimum of craft, the average LOLcat has the social value of a whoopie cushion and the lifespan of a mayfly.  Yet anyone seeing a LOLcat gets a second unrelated message: You can play this game too.”

The internet bridges the gap between doing nothing and doing something.  Creating a LOLcat is more than passive consumption of pre-packaged TV shows…and opens the door to doing other original things.

Time and space are not a constraint to community formation–ideas or passions now bring people together, rather than physical locations.  Scientists that blog online–even when it’s looked down upon by fellow scientists? We are modeling positive deviance.  It’s not so much what we write that is important, but THAT WE WRITE AT ALL.

We are creating a model for a new way of science communication.  And we are having a bitchin’ time doing it, which invites new people over to have fun with us.  You can play this game too.   We are showing lots of different ways to share science online to our friends, our friends’ friends, and to the random strange people who keep searching my blog for “sex with insects.”

It’s a kind of nerdibacter called social contagion.  The internet creates social change among total strangers. Think it’s too sparkly-kumbaya to really work?  Just look at an example from earlier this month: A shark researcher calls out a company for sponsoring a shark hunt.  He manages to mobilize an amazing network via Twitter, and the company not only pulls the promotion, but blacklists the person from ever posting with them again.  And that all played out within the space of one day.

Small individual creative acts (tweets or blog posts) can become a thing of lasting value.  Shared and unmanaged effort can produce useful and meaningful results.  No one is in charge, and that’s OK. The beauty of the web is that we don’t all have to have the same motivations, or skills, or professional level of skill. We don’t all have to be working toward the same goal.  We can still make change happen simply by putting our ideas out there.  And the value of that work isn’t from professional production values; it’s from the sharing.

A lot of the attendees at SciOnline were people like me–folks who don’t get paid to write about science. We do our thing (write, podcast, tweet, whatever) simply for the love of it.  And we are wearers of many hats–as Bora reports in his ScienceOnline2012 wrap-up post:

According to our registration form report, ScienceOnline2012 had 243 bloggers, 153 journalists, 151 scientists, 115 educators, 71 students, 43 enterpreneurs, 34 Web developers and 46 who identified as ‘other’. That total is almost 900, so on average everyone (457 people checked in at the registration desk) checked two boxes.

Even though the US is clearly falling apart politically, in a lot of ways SciOnline left me more optimistic and hopeful about the future than I’ve been for a long time.  All these people doing something because of a passion for science–it was wonderful.

Kevin is right:

“Magical things can happen when you enthusiastically open your mouth on the internet….Looking into others causes you to look into yourself. And then something really magical happens – we learn we are not alone.”

I will totally be up at 1AM next year trying to get a seat for ScienceOnline2013.  But you know what? If I don’t get a seat?  Or if I don’t have the time or energy to keep blogging/tweeting/whatevering at the same rate I do now?

It’s ok. The kids have it covered.

Filed under: Books, Science Tagged: blogging, scienceonline, scio12, social media

Źródło: ScienceOnline2012 Postmortem (and a book review)

hexapod haiku -
short poems that celebrate
most Arthropoda

The goal of this contest is to encourage people to think about the myriad ways in which insects and other terrestrial arthropods interact with their environments and other organisms (including humans!) and to express these thoughts through short poems. Despite the name of this contest we actually encourage any short poems you’re inspired to write, including (but not limited to!):

• Haiku (of course): An elegant medium, traditionally focusing on seasonal changes and nature and with a relatively standard format and objective.
• Senryū: Similar in structure to haiku but focused on the foibles of of humans and, in our case, insects, rather than seasons and nature.
• Haiga: A haiku that is accompanied by an illustration. Include a photo or draw a picture!
• Any other short poem you want to write!

We offer four awards with (small) prizes: 1) best in show, 2) runner-up, 3) best entry from poet under the age of 13, 4) runner-up from poet under the age of 13. Poems from any of the categories listed above are eligible to win any of the awards and therefore are judged together.

We also have honorable mention categories that change every year depending on the submissions we get (most traditional, funniest, best IPM-themed poem, etc.)

Visit the NCSU Insect Museum website for details on how to enter.

You can also browse through the past 5 years of winners with the tag “haiku” for inspiration and enjoyment.  A favorite of mine from 2011:

flowers’ bouquet
rousts them from their slumber
— bacon for bees

Filed under: Entomology, Insects Tagged: art, haiku, poetry

Źródło: Hexapod Haiku Contest!

Źródło: Popularity

When I first began beekeeping in 2005, there was almost nothing online and I was a lovable eccentric. Now you can find a Youtube category for any beekeeping activity about which you have a question, and this is just one of hundreds of accounts of beginning, ongoing, natural, scientific, urban, suburban, rural — you name it — beekeeping out there. SO I was not sure what to say.

Also, it was really stoopid of my to let me real place, name, face get associated with this blog, because when I get frustrated or do something completely dumb, I’m no longer in a safe corner, able to discuss it without hurting feelings or scaring the neighbors.

Finally, last year was pretty terrible. I lost 40% of my bees, 8 out of 19 colonies, only 2 for reasons I could figure out. I’ve gotten myself committed to all sorts of activities that are kinda-sorta about beekeeping, but not actually in the field or in the library learning more.

But Spring is coming again, and once again hope. We have more volunteers downtown these days, and more people have been peeking under the hive cover and sliding in some fondant, even as I get wrapped around the axle of arranging speakers for meetings and debating club policies.

And I have finally shouted out for a Downtown DC Beekeeper Meetup (Friday, February 24 7:00 PM Church of the Reformation, 212 East Capitol Street, Capitol South or Eastern Market Metro) and was thinking that, depending on who and how many show up, there might be some insight into what I could be saying or doing here.

Please come if you are nearby and have the time, all are welcome. We are just planning on introducing ourselves and comparing notes right now.

Źródło: Year 7 Begins

Some time ago, I got an email from a student in the UK working on an Entomophagy project:

“I’m a postgraduate design student studying at the Royal College of Art in London, who is currently knee deep in a project on Entomophagy. Myself and 3 other students have spent the last four months developing a roadmap to western acceptance of bug eating.”

I referred them to Dave Gracer as the local Entomophagy Maven, and then sort of forgot about it. And then….Lo and Behold! They produced this project, with input from Dave and entomologists.

I’m not entirely sure what a Masters Degree in Innovation Design Engineering is, but if it produces results like this, I think we need more of them.  Well done!

More about the project:

“Ento is a project by Aran Dasan, Jacky Chung, Jonathan Fraser and Julene Aguirre-Bielchowsky, who are a team working together on the Innovation Design Engineering joint Masters course at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. We also collaborated with Kim Insu in producing the food, who is a chef in training at Le Cordon Bleu.

This project is the outcome of the team’s motivation to tackle the growing issue of food security in an increasingly hungry world. Discovering the environmental and nutritional benefits of insects as a sustainable alternative to the high energy required to produce other meats, we wanted to see how it could be introduced into Western cultures through design.

It’s not just about introducing a new food, it’s about understanding human perceptions and psychology, then using the design of innovative experiences and strategic thinking to drive cultural change.”

In other words, addressing the mental hangups we have about eating insects, as well as making the food look amazing. Their video addresses some of the ecological benefits to insect eating in a very amusing way.

Filed under: Entomology, Food, Insects Tagged: art, creativity, design, entomophagy

Źródło: Ento Box