Silflay Hraka

Damn. Nice fish.

I have on strong authority that Top Of The Hill will be opening a distillery sometime in the next year. Sadly, they will be focusing initially on the girly but popular clear liquors like vodka and gin, rather than on the manly brown whiskeys, though production of those is planned for the future.

The Gaian Rapture has been postponed indefinitely.

The apocalyptic mood seems to grow each time the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases a new section of its climate change report. Climate hysteria appears to be more contagious than a flu epidemic. “We only have 13 years left to save the earth,” screamed a recent front-page headline in the German tabloid Bild. “If mankind is unable to stop the greenhouse effect by the year 2020, it will bring about its own demise — and a horribly tortured one at that.”

The truth is probably somewhere between these two extremes. Climate change will undoubtedly have losers — but it will also have winners. There will be a reshuffling of climate zones on earth. And there is something else that we can already say with certainty: The end of the world isn’t coming any time soon.

Spoke at length with a beekeeper yesterday afternoon at Top of The Hill about Colony Collapse Disorder.

Brews consumed: Frank Graham Porter, Swim Test Saison

First, he confirmed that whatever it is, it’s not yet appeared in NC. Second, it’s primarily affecting the traveling commercial beekeepers, not the local hobby types. Third, most if not all of the media descriptions of the post-collapse hive are wrong.

The bees are gone, yes, bot not all of them. Typically, a queen and some newbies* remain. It’s almost if (here I veer into my interpretation of the event rather than his opinion) typical swarming behaviour occured as happens when a colony gets too large and a second queen is produced, yet instead of half the colony departing with her and half remaining with the new queen, the whole of the colony left.

Since no one has observed a second queen in these hives prior to the departure, there’s no way to confirm or deny that hypothesis, and it’s kinda far-fetched to begin with, as there are no reports of an unexpectedly high number of swarms this year. The keeper himself leaned towards the idea that a pesticide was affecting the bees’ ability to navigate, disorienting them so that once away from the hive, they were unable to find their way back home.

*I am unsure if he was punning or not. Certainly his presentation of the pun was completely straight-faced.

Speaking as a communter a few hundred miles away–56 on 40 isn’t an experiment. It’s an incitement to mayhem. (lvi)