Permaculture Blog

Director@wildlife.ca.gov fgc@fgc.ca.gov Under the nation’s chemical safety law, the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, federal regulators can step in to restrict use of a chemical only after proving it’s harmful. Manufacturers can sell products without first proving they’re safe. “Just the fact that [the chemicals] are untested is upsetting to me,” Rottmann said.

Mirror neurons are a type of brain neuron. They are implicated in contributing to the ability to have language, empathy, and sociability.

They are much more prevalent in humans than many animals. Although fun fact they are found in elephants and sperm whales. They are also implicated in autism. Pray tell me how an animal model would show mirror neuron damage?

A mirror neuron cell culture might be a great idea, but we wouldn’t know if it’s the interaction between them and other neurons that affects autistic expression. It is my belief that we need to fund, and find, far, far better toxin detection mechanisms then we have. And in addition, study the plethora of breakdown products of the 20,000+ toxins currently approved to use on our food.

http://chriscondello.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/land-of-the-fee-home-of-the-grave/ I highly recommend this site. Bob 310 429 8477 http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

Well, I think so.

The bugs shown in the first picture are from the tanglefoot stuff I put around borer damage on five fruit trees two weeks ago. About half of them are from stone fruit trees and the rest are from apple trees.

The second picture is some of the damage the borers did to my apple trees. The honey bee is gathering in the tanglefoot stuff to take back to its hive for winter repairs. They normally do this with the sticky sap (which they turn into propolis) that the tree forces out the borer holes but in this case it’s taking the tanglefoot. They don’t seem to take a lot, or to clean it off entirely from one area, so at this point I’m willing to donate it to them. They have enough problems in this world now anyway :-) If you zoom in you can see that the bee has put the stuff in its pollen baskets maybe we should rename them “grocery carts” :-). I am also extremely happy that the bees don’t get stuck in the tanglefoot like the Flies do. If the bees got stuck I think I would have to try to find another way to protect the trees.

I gathered as many stuck things as I could see from the tanglefoot application. What may not be obvious in the picture are the three cat tail seeds, the feather, and 4 smaller nats. Out of 14 bugs 10 were the largish type of fly. As nearly as I can tell these flies are the perfect size to make the damage that the trees had.

Any entomologists out there care to provide any additional information?

The hardest part in all of this was finding something that would disolve the tanglefoot material that they were stuck in. I tried isopropanol, acetone, vegetable oil, and a mixture of them. The oil worked, followed by acetone.

Been googling for the last hour and it seems as though the bugs are cambium flies genus Phytobia. Doesn’t seem to be a huge economic pest and they’re probably beating up my trees a little bit because the trees already had gopher damage on top of the dwarfing root stocks. Now that the trees are safer from gophers (notice I said safer instead of safe) :-) It’s likely that the natural predators will take over. I had a bunch of spiders last year and I hope they will come back.

I think I’ve got a mole. :-) I saw little pushed up runs around the orchard the other day. I dug a few up and they were all pretty much on the surface and about the diameter of my thumb which is pretty darn small for a gopher.

When I first saw the tracks I was afraid that the gophers had finally jumped the moat. (Pole vaulted?:-) ) I kept watching the tracks over a couple of days and they would go near a tree but then around it. So it seems to me that this all fits fairly well with mole biology. They are carnivores and searching for grubs, insects, and earthworms. They don’t hurt the trees and seem to be more like little bulldozers instead of digging out a tunnel. With all the compost I put in the orchard I think I have enough earthworms to spare some.:-)

I would bet that they wouldn’t turn down a meal of some fat insect chewing on my tree roots either. So maybe I’ll hire this one to keep tunneling around my orchard checking for ground dwelling insect pests. My own little fur coated security company. Hey! It’s got free range, organically grown, mole food. Maybe it will be like my bobcat and reproduce. Geez thinking about the bobcat…. The bobcat and kittens have devastated the rabbit population. Four years ago I had up to 15 rabbits that I could count around the property and I haven’t seen one in a month.

So I’m watching a bunch of bees using water from my pond and there are at least two groups. One flies west southwest and up my driveway and out of sight. The other group heads south east, up over a bush, then a tree, and out of sight. I started counting them and there were about 40 outgoing flights in 40 seconds. Which makes 60 in sixty seconds — a minute. which makes 60 times 60 = 3600 trips per hour. If you assume one bee is taking 20 microliters (having worked in a molecular biology lab that’s a pretty good estimate — about a quarter of a drop). That works out to 72000 microliters or 72 mls. And that’s all per hour for 2 hives. There is a third hive which starts coming a little later in the day and lasts longer into the evening probably because of the Feng Shui of the hive :-) .

So a total of 3 hives and 100 mls or a tenth of a liter It is winter and not very hot and daylight is only about 8 hours a day. So if they are tanking up 6 hours out of that 8 hours that’s .6 liters a day to the bees. Which works out to 18 l per month which is pretty close to 5 gallons and that is the highest use winter scenario. Not augmented by water from fog or rain.

Summer will mean higher number of trips per hour, longer daylight, less chance of rain or dew agmentation, and probably a fourth hive heading north west. This would generate a significantly higher water use in the summer.

It has been stated that a large hive of bees can use 10 gallons on a hot day in the summer. I don’t know whether these hives are very big but I bet four medium size hives could come close to that. In addition, my original flight number may be low because recounting it an hour later at 11 a.m. it had doubled.

I am happy to provide :-) and by the way the bobcat, raccoon, coyote, ground squirrels, skunks, and rabbits drink too!

So what are the bees using all this water for? Their hive swamp cooler. They put the water around the entrance of their hive and another group of bees sit there fanning it with their wings. Evaporative cooling just like our sweat evaporates and cools us.

Now think about it! Any toxins in the water are being concentrated right at the entrance of the hive 100X 1000X 10000X. Please don’t put water conditioners, bleach, algaecides, algaefix :-[ or other toxins in your outside sources of water.

Bob
http://www.PuraVidaAquatic.com

This is a story about a bioremediation system. A constructed wetland is compared against mechanical filtration. Bob http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4568046

On every important measure — capital expenditure, operational expenditure, and performance — the constructed wetland outperformed the traditional approach. Power consumption and CO2 emissions were reduced by 98 percent, which lowered operating expenses dramatically. And as a bonus, the wetland provides habitat for fish and hundreds of species of migratory birds.

sort of obligates one to pay attention to the environment a little bit. I like looking at the tracks on my driveway which is dirt. It finally dawned on me what this one was. Any guesses?

Here is another comment on my posting a while back about how a dwarfing root stock will cripple a tree and cause it to be more susceptible to diseases. The next time a nurseryman tells you that the smaller tree will produce just as much fruit as a full size tree put on your best stupid face and ask him or her where does it get the extra energy?

Really! Has the tree perfected the perpetual motion machine? –Coldfusion? –Some other form of hidden energy? The smaller tree has fewer leaves, a smaller profile, and even a lower efficiency of light reception (the shade underneath it is less dense).

What is producing all that extra sugar to make the same amount of fruit?

The title is bushtits except that the pictures are of my peas. Peas with funny marks on their leaves. Last year I saw the California towhees eating the new growth buds on my peas and commented here that I should plant more peas because the towhees probably needed something to eat in the winter when there are not a lot of bugs around. Having more insect eating birds to me is a good thing. So this year, I did just that. I spent a whole extra 1.89$ for more pea seeds … for the birds.

When we got rain a little while ago and I was opening up my “tinfoil fruit” I also planted peas around the base of some of my trees.

Something has obviously been munching a bit on them and I was looking at them today and noticed triangular marks… beak marks. Well I think that the marks are beak marks. They are too fine and narrow to be a towhee. My guess is that the marks are from the bushtits which are still around. The thing that amuses me the most is that these peas are at the very tree where I was watching the bushtits hop around right in front of my face, a couple of months ago, eating aphids.
http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/bushtits/

I was looking at a big twisted branch on my pluot tree and realized that it had partially broken and twisted. It seems to me that it probably did it at the same time another branch broke off last year. I had found the branch that broke off last summer when it fell. The branch I was now looking at had almost completely repaired itself. But it was now, sort of rotated about 80 degrees and pointed at the ground. Imagine if standing you had your arm bent slightly and reaching up. Then it broke at your bicep and your hand rotated down about 80 degrees.

The reason the one I had found earlier broke off was the weight of the fruit it had on it last summer. So that’s probably the reason the second one broke as well.

In thinking about that, I wondered if the amount of fruit on a tree might be a wonderful way for the tree to determine how fast it was growing. In other words how good life was.

Now from the tree’s perspective if it is growing extremely well and therefore has a massive amount of fruit on its limbs, probably it has happened to find an extremely good place to be growing. Or maybe its neighbors have suffered a calamity and given it more air, room, and light . So don’t you think it would make sense for the tree to have actually evolved to crack and break its branches and let them sag down into the soil where they would quickly, and with no need to change its genetics, start a new copy of itself? And also to only do this if life was really really good!

Many, many plants can start copies of themselves by developing roots on branches that have come into contact with the soil. This would allow a tree that had found a great spot to reproduce itself much faster than by seed (what most people assume is the only reason for the fruit). Air layering a branch or even starting a cutting generally generates a tree much quicker than from a seed. Maybe there are multiple reasons to have fruit in the first place and also a complex interaction between the strength of a branch and the size of the fruit and the number of potential genetic changes in the offspring (number of fruit).

Trees have had years, and years, and years, and years, and unfathomable years, to perfect little fun genetic tricks like that. And I’ll bet there are thousands of little tricks that they use. Whether the one just hypothesized is among them, who knows. But it was fun thinking about, and I hope you have had fun thinking about it too.