German airports use “Biodetective” honeybees to monitor air quality. Environmental monitoring has come a long way since the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Now we use bees. Airports in Germany are using honeybees as “biodetectives,” regularly testing their honey for a suite of pollutants, the New York Timesreports. This year’s first tests were conducted in early June at Düsseldorf International Airport, and the bees got a clean bill of health. That means the air was clean, too. Members of a local beekeepers’ group keep the bees, and the honey, “Düsseldorf Natural,” is bottled and given away as gifts, the Times says. About 200,000 bees are involved in the Düsseldorf program; seven other German airports also work with bees.
A German lab tests honey samples twice a year and looks for compounds like hydrocarbons and heavy metals. The latest tests showed the bees’ honey was comparable to honey produced in areas with no industrial activity. Airplane, taxi, bus and car emissions — as well as local industry — contribute to poor air quality around airports, the Times reports. Airport officials say the industry has made progress reducing pollution, but the Times quotes two studies that suggest particulates can be a problem. The Environmental Protection Agency financed an airport air-quality study set to be released soon, and one of the lead researchers says fine ultra-fine particles and lead are a potential public health concern. Bees are one way to track those toxins because their honey would have telltale signs of pollution. If they use nectar from flowers produced by toxin-exposed plants, that would show up in the honey.
The Times quotes one honeybee expert who said the work seems promising, if inconclusive: “We all believe it can be done, but translating the results into real-world solutions or answers may be a little premature,” says Jamie Ellis, assistant professor of entomology at the Honey Bee Research and Extension Laboratory, University of Florida-Gainesville. Other experts caution that bee-monitoring should not replace traditional monitoring systems.
But at the very least, the work is a simple way for the public to understand the effects of pollution.
[New York Times, by Rebecca Boyle]
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During a check of the hives, I found this young workerbee just next to the flighthole. The t° being below 10°, I guess she was hit by the cold. She seemed more dead than alive, and I decided to take her inside for an inspection under the microscope. While filming, a varroamite fell out of her thorax-fur. The young bee got more lively again, due to the warmth of the microscope lights. I put her in front of the flighthole, and she nicely walked into the hive again. I destroyed the dirty varroa mite.
Varroa is still a huge problem for hive#01. Some 30 mites a week are dropping down, even after a treatment with Thymovar. I’ll have to look into another solution if I don’t want to lose the colony. The 4 other colonies (2 at so-on’s and 2 at okno’s Open Green) are healthy.
the Green Studies reader – from Romanticism to Ecocriticism
edited by Laurence Coupe, Routledge – 2000
Where is the litterature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them – transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two musty leaves in a library – aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.
Henry David Thoreau – Writing the Wilderness
From ‘Walking’ (1862), in Essays and Other Writings
Ed. Will H. Dircks, London: Walter Scott Ltd, 1895.
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In 1954, when I went to Europe, I no sooner arrived in Paris than I noticed that the city was covered with posters publicizing a mushroom exhibition that was being held in the Botanical Gardens. That was all I needed. Off I went. When I arrived, I found myself in a large room filled with many tables upon which were displayed many species of fungi. On the hour from a large centrally-placed loudspeaker a recorded lecture on the deadly poisonous amanitas was delivered. During this lecture, nobody in the hall moved or spoke. Each person’s attention was, so to speak, riveted to the information being given.
A week later, I was in Cologne in Germany attending a concert of electronic music. There was also an audience and a large loudspeaker. However, many in the audience were dozing off, and some were talking to their neighbors.
John Cage, Indeterminacy
http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/s.cgi?48
Just a perfect day. Indian summer. The bees bring in pollen in abundancy. I just discovered the immense ivy covering the whole wall of la Bellone. Winterfood for my bees.
Today I started to note down the inside hive t° every hour, and compared it to the outside t° and the outside humidity.
In the sun, reading Indeterminacy. Cage was a well-known mycologist. Crazy about fungi. Short stories and mesostics about mushrooms. And later in the afternoon I met Thoreau. Walden & the civil disobedience. Wild is exiting, he says. And tame is dull.
Writing the wilderness. Can a poem give expression to nature?
Later, before sunset, cleaned out the rotten tomatoes but took their seeds for next year… and sown some winter lettuce in the cold greenhouse. The olives are slowly ripening and the figues are big and sweet.
The day and night of 2010/10/10 I did some measurements inside and outside hive#01. On the document you can see that the in- and outside t° are running up- and down on a proportional basis.
The t° sensor was placed at the outer inside of the hive, not in the broodnest itself. On saturday, october 16th, I expanded the observation by adding a digital thermometer to the hive#03, which is situated next to hive#01. I put the sensor in both hives in the broodnest itself. The average outside t° is much colder yet, at night the t° often falls down towards 4°.
I noticed the immediate rise of inside-hive t°, now that the sensor is in the center of the broodnest.
In daytime (no immediate sun) the hive t° was rising till 36°, at night the t° fell down to 23°. There is a difference of ± 3° in the average inside hive t° of hive#01 (less) and hive@02 (more). I don’t know (but should find out) if this t° difference is due to the (still) high varroa contamination of hive#01, even after 2 treatments with Thymovar.
p.s.
The drawing on the rooftop is part of an art project by GOeART.
Following the Nazca lines, let’s turn the roofs of buildings and unused, abandoned spaces into works of art that can be seen from space! This is not just about being creative and artistic, but also making gestures on invisible, unknown and unused areas of our heritage. Being able to access aerial views of these areas is an unprecedented opportunity to practice a monumental art which says something about us, where we live or don’t live, how we relate to a globalised world, our intimacies, these holes, these windows which hide and reveal us … How? Let’s use the roofs of our city as something to draw on. You can’t see these drawings from terra firma, only from the sky. New works can be seen each time the satellites that take aerial views of our cities and areas pass overhead. Find our hidden guides, get up on the roofs and help create the first work of art visible from space.
Tagine recipies with vegetables from the season – some of them straight from our city rooftop garden:
take 2 tagine cookers, a 31cm one and a 25cm one. Soak them for some moments in water.
Ingredients for the smallest tagine pot, in chronological order: virgin olive oil, ginger powder, cardemom pods, sliced onions, sliced parsnip, potatoes, pepper, seasalt, thyme and suffuse with a little bit of water. Turn the fire low, check the moistness regularly.
Put following ingredients in chronological order in the bigger pot : virgin olive oil, freshly picked sage (whole twigs), thyme, seasalt and black pepper, sliced onions, garden beans, 10 garlic cloves, 10 fresh dates, homemade honey, brussels sprouts, beetroot and suffuse with a bit of water. Turn the fire low and stir once in a while.
Brussels, jardin experimental, October 2010
Looking for Mushrooms.
Friday, october 8th, I went to look for mushrooms at the Jardin Experimental Massart, one of the the fieldworkspaces of the biology department of the free university of Brussels (ULB).
On my way over there, I was thinking about one of the 20th century pioneer-experimental artists: John Cage.
John Cage was not only a major figure of the musical avant-garde but also an avid mycologist, collector and consumer of mushrooms. His knowledge of the fungal world was legendary.
Indeterminacy was a lecture/performance work in which Cage recited a series of one minute stories and anecdotes in no particular order. Many of these stories related to his love of mushrooms and his experiences of collecting and studying them.
In the experimental garden/forest, I picked some of the mushrooms to study them in my studio. Following movie gives random impressions of the research of the species under the microscope, accompanied by an excerpt of Indeterminacy, read by Cage.
to watch the movie, go to the TIK video database : padma.okno.be
check also other movies of the OpenGreens collection: research OpenGreens – the marginal zones in the city where culture and nature overlap and enter into a symbiotic relationship.
Open Greens research on Korcula Island, Croatia. First we identified the most common species of wild edible plants in the area. Secondly we made an overview of the ones that are overlapping with the edible wild plants in Brussels and surroundings. Thirdly, we went in search for specific plant-linked stories, traditional knowledge and traditional heritage. Sani Sardelic of the local museum accompanied us on a private walk through the inlands, telling us about recipies of local wild plants, linked to the food served on the Last Supper of the Christ – an habit that is annually revived by some of the Korcula fraternities. Medicinal qualities of plants were discussed, and furtheron we visited a local beekeeper with 80 hives, Carnica bees and wonderful salvia/sauge honey.
On the island are lots of melliferous mediterrenean plants, as erica arborea (tree heath), erica lusitania (portuguese heath), wild mentha (mint), echium plantagineum (purple viper’s bugloss), salvia officinalis (sauge), rosmarinus officinalis (rosemary), thymus officinalis (common thyme) and more … Especially the hedera helix (ivy), subspecies poetarum Nyman (balkans) is fully blossoming these days and is an important provider of winterpollen for the bees.
For now, all this information is archived in our mental database, and we are spinning on some experimental setups to link clocks, wind and time with longterm monitoring of several Open Greens.
Bees are an essential link in our food- and flora ecosystem. They pollinate a third of what we eat.The loss of biodiversity threatens the survival of the bees.Due to monocultures and pesticides the bees get weaker and they become more sensitive to bee diseases as varroase and colony collapse disorder.
The biodiversity of the city -the balconies, parks, streets, wastelands and city gardens- shapes a perfect foraging area for the creation of a superb and delicate honey from the neighborhoods of the Kanal and the inner-city.
By buying a pot of Brussels OpenGreens honey, you foster a cluster of our Brussels honeybees and become a privileged member of okno’s bee-plan.
On the attached form, you can make a choice of the hive you want to foster. The OpenGreens beekeepers will tell you the whole story of the 2011 bee-season.You will be invited to bee classes for beginners and you can follow the development of a bee colony in our observation hives.You can participate in a seedballing-for-honeybees workshop and do some native wildflower seedbombing in the city.You can join our Brussels neighborhoods walks in search of honey trees and honey plants, and discover your city through bees-eyes.
Please fill the attached form and send it to opengreens@okno.be :
adoptation-form
Exchange between the Czech Republic bee association members and the Brussels Urban Beekeepers.
City apiaries, research projects on city honey plants, bees as actors to discover the city’s public space … all this compared to countryside beekeeping in a country where beekeeping represents a serious part of the agricultural ressources.
