Saturday (Saudi Monday 2/27/10)

My left eye is sore to the touch in the corner and is showing some red smears. Could be from the dust in the air. We are experiencing shamal winds and this is the worst I have seen it. I haven't been taking my walks because of it. Could be that I hit when I was sleeping.

I just finished an interesting book, "Fruitless Fall", by Rowan Jacobson. He chronicles the plight of the honey bee in what we are seeing as a collapse of the commercial apiary industry due to stress on the bees. He points out the importance of those bees for our agricultural abundance and what that collapse is meaning to current productivity and future productivity in agricultural productivity. I was aware that hives were hauled on trucks from here to Canada to pollinate clover fields and other crops, but Jacobson paints that picture as much more expansive that I ever thought. Already there are crops that are no longer available due to the lack of pollinators - in Japan the bees that pollinate pears is extinct and the only way to pollinate the pear trees is by human hands, so women and children climb the trees and go from flower to flower with swabs to pollinate the flowers. Vanilla is now only available now because of human pollination - that is why it is so expensive. He also explained the honey market and how the Chinese have flooded the market with watered down honey - watered down by corn syrup. See my post of several weeks ago where I found honey that was nothing but corn syrup. On top of that the Chinese honey has been heavily laced with pesticidal toxins ingested by the bees and secreted into the honey. Very interesting reading. I want to start a hive now :)