Bee nice to the bees

By now we all know that domesticated honey bees are in trouble and disappearing fast. It's estimated that 1/3 of the human food supply depends on insect pollination, most of which is accomplished by bees, so they're pretty important if we want to keep eating honey, strawberries, pears, oh and wear clothes made of cotton - yep, bees pollinate cotton, too.

Plenty magazine has somes tips about how we can help the bees. You don't have to go out and start your own hive, just follow these easy steps to make your lawn and garden more hospitable to the little guys. They'll thank you for it.

Bee-tox: The first thing to do is to detox your lawn. Give your chem lawn type landscape service its walking papers. Pollinators are a fragile bunch, and many native bees nest in the ground, says Vaughan, so lawn company insecticides will really do them in. “Even organic services may use natural products like pyrethrins, which are labeled for organic use, but still kill pollinators,” says Vaughan. Think your modest little lawn isn’t big enough to make a difference? Think again. Urban gardens and backyards suck up even more insecticide than conventional farm land does.

Flower child: Think blossoms. Grow lots of different kinds of flowering plants on your property, so that at any given time from early spring right through to autumn there will be at least three or four species in bloom. Trees, shrubs, and wild flowers will all do just fine.

Bare all: Incorporate small areas of bare soil into your garden or lawn. Bees like to nest where there’s a little open space on the ground, and are more likely to move in and enjoy your prime real estate if they feel they’ve got room to breathe.

Tunnel vision: Some native bees nest not in the ground, but in hollowed out vertical structures, like tree trunks. Help these guys out by drilling narrow holes (5/16 inch or less) five inches down through blocks of wood, then setting the blocks out on your property. Home sweet home.

Let your lawn go: If you’re not too vain about the appearance of your lawn, leave a corner of it “undisturbed and untidy,” says Vaughan. Think tall grasses, piles of sticks, general horticultural chaos. The mess will invite mice to set up house, and when they leave, bees will move into the nice insulated little cavity-homes they’ve dug out.

Way to go Home Depot!

Good news for those of you who like using CFL lightbulbs but don't like the hassle of figuring out how to properly dispose of them (you did know you can't just throw them in the trash, right?).

Home Depot has announced that they will start collecting spent, unbroken CFL bulbs in all of their stores. You simply bring your old bulb to the returns desk, and it will then "be managed responsibly by an environmental management company who will coordinate CFL packaging, transportation and recycling to maximize safety and ensure environmental compliance." And starting in September, each store will have a designated receptacle for the bulbs. You can even bring bulbs that you didn't buy at Home Depot.

So go ahead and switch your old lightbulbs for new energy-efficient ones, and let Home Depot take care of disposing of them when they die, which, fortunately, doesn't happen for a long time.

(If you accidentally break your CFL bulb, don't panic, but do follow these steps for cleaning it up.)

National HIV Testing Day

Today is National HIV Testing Day.

According to the CDC, about 1 million people in the U.S. are infected with HIV. A quarter of those people don’t know that they’re infected.

Friday, June 27 is National HIV Testing Day and across the country, thousands of HIV counseling and testing providers will participate. The first step in protecting yourself from HIV is being tested. Why wait?

All Planned Parenthood affiliates offer HIV testing; some sites offer it free. Click here for a full list of services Planned Parenthood provides, and here for clinic locations in the DFW area.

WTF mates?

This is an old one, but it never fails to entertain me.

Hope it entertains you, too.

Happy Friday.

New Yorker Cartoon

Now honey, don't take this the wrong way...


by Mick Stevens
Published in The New Yorker June 22, 1992

O! How I love you

On my guilty pleasures list is O, The Oprah Magazine. I picked one up at the airport a couple weeks ago and read it cover to cover.

Here's a piece by Amanda Robb entitled A Little Empathy, Please.

Here, too, is a lovely little piece about the difference between men and women.

Do enjoy.

How bizarre

Gloucester, Mass. has made headlines lately because of some bizarre pact among several of its high school girls to become pregnant and raise their babies together. The high school principal was the one who broke the news of the pact, but now it appears that it may not be true - the principal is hazy on details, and one of the pregnant girls, Lindsey Oliver, has come forward to deny that there was a pact. She said most of the girls were already pregnant when they made a pact to help each other raise their kids and stay in school.

Whether or not there was a pact to get pregnant, this issue highlights a problem that the entire country faces. Texas has the highest rate of teen pregnancy and births in the country. Sadly, we also have the highest number of second births to teenagers. So glad we spend millions on abstinency-only education.

One quote from a Time article yesterday really struck me:

Some described the pregnant teens as having little parental supervision. "They could stay out all night if they wanted," says a classmate...

Certainly a lack of parental attention and involvement plays into the story. But then I was reminded of how Jamie Lynn Spears's mother reacted when she found out her 15-year-old daughter was pregnant. She was shocked, claiming that her daughter was always a "good girl" who was never late for curfew.

So it turns out that girls can get pregnant if their parents are paying attention, or not; at 2 a.m. or 2 p.m.; whether they're "good girls" or...you get the drift.

Clearly, the conversation isn't being had about safe sex, and that's the problem.

The 17-year-old Lindsey Oliver really gets it:

She said there's more of a problem with schools not providing contraceptives to teens.

"Well, I think that they sit there and they say that they want to make a difference and it's awful that all these kids are getting pregnant, but they don't want to do anything to help them. They won't put contraceptives in the nurse's office or anything and no kid wants to go into the store and buy them, or like, ask them mom to help them get birth control. Like, it's embarrassing. So, instead of, like, making them make the decision not to use any of them, they should be giving them out in the nurse's office so you can get it anonymously," Oliver said.

She said the argument that providing contraceptives encourages teens to have sex doesn't make sense.

"The kids are obviously having it anyway. There are 17 pregnant girls. I mean, they're not going to stop it by not giving them anything. They're only going to make matters worse," she said.

Out of the mouths of babes.

UPDATE: Check out The Rev. Debra Haffner's piece about this issue.