[ExI] bees

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Henry Rivera
Subject: [ExI] bees

I know Spike follows this topic.

>From today's PBS Newshour.

-Henry


Are pesticides to blame for the massive bee die-off?

Video: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/are-pesticides-to-blame-for-the-massive-bee-die-off/


Thanks Henry,

The bees are a part of a bigger topic I have been thinking about for a long time: the creation of some kind of systematic way of observing changes in nature over time and recording it.  I have been a bee watcher, and I know how bees behaved in my own misspent youth.  It feels like bees just aren't as robust as I recall them from about 40 yrs ago.  Bees used to swarm all over everything while we were working.  Now it seems the hives contain about half or possibly less than half the bee population from those days.

We might see subtle changes in birds and other beasts as well, but if change is gradual, we might not notice.

Regarding some kind of systematic way to record the natural world, YouTube gets me part of the way there.  I am thinking in the big picture here, some next-generation indexing method for archiving any natural metric we can think of.  We have surface temperature records and these cause us to theorize on the notion of global warming.  We should have something analogous to temperature data, recording a thousand metrics where now there is one.

spike