DescentBB

I guess environmentalist loons decided they weren't loony enough.

Fifty thousand bumblebees will be honored in a memorial this weekend at the Wilsonville Target where a majority of the insects died. State officials directly linked the die-off to trees that had been sprayed with the insecticide Safari.

Rozzell Medina, of Portland, said on the Facebook page that the event will "memorialize these fallen lifeforms and talk about the plight of the bees and their importance to life on Earth."

http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/i ... led_f.html

If only humans valued human life at least as much anymore.

I suspect THOSE folks DO value human life as much, or more. Also, worth noting is the importance of bees to human life, and the growing of food.
So, bottom line, a bit excessive, but hardly unthinkably over the top. Now, off to celebrate the life cycle by spending the weekend attempting to catch fish and eat them. Have a nice weekend, all!!!

Nope since I live here in Portland, thier moto is

"keep Portland weird"

Thats pretty par for the course.

A nutty implementation, but the part about drawing attention to the problem is good. What they're trying to do is leverage public opinion on the matter, in order to stop the use of the stuff that killed the bees, I would think.

Some of you scoff at this one, but if it weren't for all types of bees, we'd starve. The agricultural industry DEPENDS on bees to pollinate their crops, even the fuzzy Bumble Bee. Honeybees are already in decline too, so they've become more important. So if there's no pollination, no food gets produced. That one instance of spraying, at the wrong time of year when those trees were flowering, probably killed off a whole slew of bee colonies for miles around. I always wait to spray insecticide until after the plant has flowered, so you'd think those idiots would have waited for a few weeks until the flowers had dropped.

http://www.extension.umn.edu/distributi ... G8484.html

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=37731

Thorne's right here (man am I saying this?): it's kind of a goofy concept, but it calls much-needed attention to the fact that bees are critical to human agriculture, and that most of them aren't doing so hot right now. Domesticated honeybees have experiencing colony die-offs at an increasing frequency, and we're not entirely sure why as of right now; bumblebee populations are threatened for a variety of reasons too. This instance was due to a colossally-stupid use of a pesticide applied at the worst time of the year for bees, and definitely should have been avoided.

Bees > Bunnys

The last I had heard, the colony die off problem was figured out…and the remaining problem is to get keepers to adopt the solutions.

You mean they've found a way to fix Zombees or colony collapse disorder?

And you do realize that Africanized Killer Bees are resistant to this parasite, so they tend to take over an area after all the regular bees die off? Which means that as the regular bees vanish, we get the nasty, easy-to-piss-off variety moving in that just loves to attack humans in swarms. They aren't as efficient of crop pollinators either. What those in your backyard?

tunnelcat wrote:Some of you scoff at this one, but if it weren't for all types of bees, we'd starve. The agricultural industry DEPENDS on bees to pollinate their crops, even the fuzzy Bumble Bee. Honeybees are already in decline too, so they've become more important. So if there's no pollination, no food gets produced. That one instance of spraying, at the wrong time of year when those trees were flowering, probably killed off a whole slew of bee colonies for miles around. I always wait to spray insecticide until after the plant has flowered, so you'd think those idiots would have waited for a few weeks until the flowers had dropped.

http://www.extension.umn.edu/distributi ... G8484.html

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=37731

Not poo-fooing the bees. That IS a serious problem and who'da thunk that insecticides would kill bees, right?
Good grief.. it should be brain science.

But a memorial? ugh. At least they temporarily banned spraying.

Oh yea Cuda, don't forget, they like to run barefooted here too because it's "natural" .. that's great until you meet something UN-natural like glass ... or natural things like rocks or dog poo.

I'll keep my shoes thanks. Guess I should start running too.

When I went barefoot as a kid, I invariably stepped on....you guessed it....bees! They love that clover in the grass, but not my foot.

Duper wrote:

tunnelcat wrote:Some of you scoff at this one, but if it weren't for all types of bees, we'd starve. The agricultural industry DEPENDS on bees to pollinate their crops, even the fuzzy Bumble Bee. Honeybees are already in decline too, so they've become more important. So if there's no pollination, no food gets produced. That one instance of spraying, at the wrong time of year when those trees were flowering, probably killed off a whole slew of bee colonies for miles around. I always wait to spray insecticide until after the plant has flowered, so you'd think those idiots would have waited for a few weeks until the flowers had dropped.

http://www.extension.umn.edu/distributi ... G8484.html

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=37731

Not poo-fooing the bees. That IS a serious problem and who'da thunk that insecticides would kill bees, right?
Good grief.. it should be brain science.

But a memorial? ugh. At least they temporarily banned spraying.

Oh yea Cuda, don't forget, they like to run barefooted here too because it's "natural" .. that's great until you meet something UN-natural like glass ... or natural things like rocks or dog poo.

I'll keep my shoes thanks. Guess I should start running too.

And they have the naked bike rides here too. don't know how they get away with that one legally, riding through the city naked. Seems to me there would be more then a few arrests on that issue.

Isn't all that Portland weirdness the reason they made the show Portlandia?

sad thing is, that show isn't too far off the mark.

That show is hilarious!

Duper wrote:sad thing is, that show isn't too far off the mark.

I don't know. Corvallis may be weirder.