New Quaker Notebook

Bees are disappearing all over the place, and beekeepers and experts who study bees and pollination are stumped—and worried:

As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call "colony collapse disorder," growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.

Along with recent stresses on the bees themselves, as well as on an industry increasingly under consolidation, some fear this disorder may force a breaking point for even large beekeepers.

A Cornell University study has estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts.

"Every third bite we consume in our diet is dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food," said Zac Browning, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.

The bee losses are ranging from 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70 percent. Beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20 percent in the off-season to be normal.¹

California is at risk for losing its almond crops, which depend on the bees for pollination. This honeybee loss is happening in 24 states in the US.

Talking to Text

I'm still making the trek from Daytona Beach to Jacksonville everyday, at least until I settle on a new place near the college. In the meantime, although I enjoy my NPR, I've decided that I need to be productive during the drive and have taken to dictating new writing, etc., into my new Olympus VN2100PC voice recorder. What happens after that is the challenge. I don't have a secretary, so having someone type up the dictation is out of the question. So I'm trying out a technology alternative. I would call it a "solution," but nothing's solved yet. I'm using this Olympus model because it's small, convenient, runs on 2AAA batteries, saves 64MB of recording, records for 35 hours, and saves my dictation to .wav files via a USB connector.

I tried using Microsoft's amazing Speech Recognition engine for converting my spoken dictation to written text, but the conversion is not at all the same outstanding quality you get by speaking directly into a microphone. Since the Olympus can save the dictation as .wav files, my alternative is to try out Better Wave To Text v5.26. I can see that it's going to be a bumpy ride. I dictated today's blog. Here are the first four paragraphs as translated:

Sunday afternoon to bicycling across the tracks along eight street Vallejo nineteen to coming to write to colon AMA three decided the old that it was a visit thank to a net gain that ceramic tile the same time and cement golf war the rooms comma the white Clyde is doable as the Anza heads as his client the they were collar way in bloom Greenlee recall Ewell and yellow Sunday when they would make it was all done idea was no machine in all I did a couple of summers eighteen the one thing that hyphen and helpful to me was that I had only owing inning and an awfully the afternoon enhance half hour for lunch and during a lunch in the Taiwan she likes fifteen minutes and then I would go near the tracks nanny dealers and logistic why it's gotten new is not kinds of I'm all kinds of of stamped and where the snag a Mason novel and that was clay and a satellite and canal is just enough to realize just enough to revive the game gallon tank race ...

So far it's absolute nonsense. If I'm not able to make this work out, I may end up having to talk directly into Word with my laptop on the passenger seat. I know that at least works—and it works well. There just aren't any other economical alternatives to getting sound files translated to text. Let's see what happens.

Biking past the Big Easy

It's afternoon on First Day and I'm tooling around on my bicycle in Holly Hill, Florida, and I'm just crossing the railroad tracks on 8th Street and right at the corner there used to be a tile factory that made cement tiles for roofs. I worked there two summers while attending college in Tampa.

The tiles were all made by hand and I don't recall that we even used a machine to mix the cement. The finished tiles were available in any color, I think, although I remember only red, blue, yellow, green, and black. We made the colored tiles by mixing a powdered color with the cement in a mixer and then pouring that into individual molds. We then stacked these for drying.

Usually at the end of the day I was covered from head to sneakers with whatever colors we happened to be working with that day. I walked to work and also walked home, and I guess I looked pretty interesting at the end of the day, multicolored as I was. The colors all came out in the shower, but my hair always seemed stiff even after showering.

I remember that I would bring my lunch: at lunchtime I would go over to the yard next to the small building, right near the tracks, and pull out of my pocket the Timex pocket watch I had attached to my belt with a leather strap. I think a wristwatch got too dirty, so the pocket watch was at the time a cool alternative. I always took out the watch because I only had a half hour for lunch. I would eat my lunch (usually a sandwich and apple) in about 15 minutes and then I would take a power nap on the grass for another 15 minutes. That was enough to revive me completely and I could get through the rest of the afternoon with vigor.

The yard is now a holding area for used cars, surrounded on all four sides by a tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The small tile factory is no longer there, either. In its place is a carpet shop renovated with a façade of pastel green bathroom tiles and purple paint on the side walls. The two small windows in the front have bars on them. I can't tell if the business is doing well or not.

In any case, I mention the nap because I share that at least with the current US president. He likes to nap, too. I mean, being president is hard work. He also likes to ride his bicycle. Unlike me, though, he naps at times when he should be doing things presidential and he rides his bike when he should be attending to other things.

Specifically, he was out riding his bike while "high-level officials joined in a White House drill Saturday to see how the government would respond if several cities were attacked simultaneously by the type of the roadside bombs used against American troops in Iraq."¹ The exercise went on for over three hours, but the Cheney-Bush presidency was completely absent. You would think that after the tragedy in New Orleans, caused most directly by government neglect, this president would at least want to make an appearance. Not so. This president is the Big Easy, the president that Care Forgot. Cheney was in Japan talking up the Iraq war and trying to talk scary about Iran, so at least he has an excuse for his absence.²

1. "White House Conducts Bomb Drill," AP/Federal News Radio, February 24, 2007.
2. "Feisty Cheney makes waves on trip to Asia, Australia," AP/Mercury News, February 25, 2007.

Bees' Bittersweet Byes

Talking to Text

Biking past the Big Easy