I’ve been building all sorts of beneficial insect habitats and hotels over the past few months, as I finish installing a food forest design. One of the last components of this little edible ecosystem I am going to add is a top bar beehive.
This subset of beehive designs is one of the oldest modes of beekeeping, and mimics the way bees build their combs in nature. A beeswax-coated bar is placed over a protected cavity, and the bees build the rest in the form of the vessel.
Short top-bar hive from Greece, as depicted in 1682: Wikimedia Commons
It is both a productive, and apicentric mode of beekeeping. Designs can be adapted to account for what materials are locally available, and the system can thrive with little to no upkeep.
My father-in-law works at the municipal recycling station, so I am going to try build a simple small top bar hive with a window, using what recycled materials and timber he can find for the project.After which time, I just need to come into some European Honeybees!
An experimental conservation project that was abandoned and almost forgotten about, has ended up producing an amazing ecological win nearly two decades after it was dreamt up.
The plan, which saw a juice company dump 1,000 truckloads of waste orange peel in a barren pasture in Costa Rica back in the mid 1990s, has eventually revitalised the desolate site into a thriving, lush forest.
This is the greatest thing I’ve read in a long time and I want this experiment replicated everywhere as soon as possible.
My town would be a good start.
the funniest part is that everyone is so surprised.
“composting kitchen waste makes plants grow. who knew???”
well… everyone?
It’s not so much that they’re SURPRISED about it. That was actually the original plan.
This juice company agreed to donate a few acres of its own land to a bordering national park, and compost orange peels there to help restore the land. They were subsequently sued by a rival juice company for having “defiled a national park.” The law sided with the rival company, and the project was discontinued early.
This isn’t so much a “Wow SO SURPRISE!” as a “FUCKIN’ TOLD YOU SO!”
Plus also, sixteen years ago, we might’ve known the answer to the question “What happens when you compost kitchen waste?” but we DIDN’T know the answer to “What happens when you dump 12,000 tons of orange peel on 7 acres of ecologically depleted wasteland?”
And for the first six months, the answer was, “7 acres of nasty-smelling, fly breeding ex-fruit sludge, and a lawsuit from a rival juice company,” but 16 years LATER we can say, “A 176 percent increase in above-ground biomass, and a study site so transformed we couldn’t tell we had the right place until we dug the sign out of undergrowth consisting mainly of native shrubs and grasses, SUCK IT, TICO FRUIT!!!!”
December 2018 - Antifascists in
Szczecin, Poland, put up some Christmas decorations to make sure everyone in their city has happy holidays, except the fascists of course. Keep your neighbourhood clean! [video]
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
