Vegan News 5.6.13

Utah cabin had uninvited guests- 60,000 bees I don’t know how bees feel about vacuums, however, glad to see they were relocated and not killed -> “They didn’t want to kill the honeybees, a species in decline that does yeoman’s work pollinating flowers and crops.  So they called Bachman, owner of Deseret Hive Supply, a hobbyist store that can’t keep up with demand for honeybees. Bachman used a vacuum cleaner to suck the bees into a cage.  ‘It doesn’t hurt them,’ he said.”

Why Your Supermarket Only Sells 5 Kinds of Apples “Bunk called this period the Great American Agricultural Revolution. ‘When this all happened, there was no USDA, no land grant colleges, no pomological societies,’ he says. ‘This was just grassroots. Farmers being breeders.’ As farms industrialized, though, orchards got bigger and bigger. State agricultural extension services encouraged orchardists to focus on the handful of varieties that produced big crops of shiny red fruit that could withstand extensive shipping, often at the expense of flavor. Today, thousands of unique apples have been lost, while a mere handful dominate the market.”

Nicaragua cloud forest ‘under siege’ by illegal loggers. “The Bosawas Biosphere Reserve is Central America’s largest tropical forest with clouds constantly drifting over the hilly terrain. But the Mayangna and Miskito people who live there say 30,000 hectares a year are being deforested by ‘colonists’. They are calling on US president Barack Obama, who is visiting the region, to support their battle. Described by the United Nations as a global biological treasure, the reserve is located on the border between Nicaragua and Honduras and teems with wildlife. The two million hectares are said to be home to 150,000 insect species, rare jaguars, eagles and crocodiles as well as the world’s last populations of Baird’s Tapir and the Central American Spider Monkey.”

Phot credit: BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives via Flickr