Thursday, October 23, 2014

WMU MAGAZINE BEE ARTICLE

BEES AND ECOLOGY

The Fall 2014 issue of the Western Michigan University Magazine is available online if you log in to wmich.edu/magazine or click the following - Western Michigan University Magazine and click on the issue.  If you use the Google Chrome browser you can easily scroll through to a few pages detailing the work of a group of WMU student's efforts at bee-keeping.

The article tells of the importance of bees in pollinating many of our food crops, and some other things of interest.  There are many things of interest about bees that I could add but they are mostly familiar to those with a biology background.  Communication among bees, colony structure and individual roles, foraging behavior, anatomical specializations can be found in many biology texts.

The issue has several other articles of general interest, especially one about one of the lost boys of Africa, and one about story-telling in Africa.  Of current interest, an interview with a WMU virologist, about the reason North America is not likely to have an Ebola epidemic similar to the one in parts of Africa, coincided with today's news reports of those dealing with recent cases here.

ENVIRONMENT

American Earth, Environmental Writing Since Thoreau is a 2008 anthology edited by Bill McKibben.
The 1048 pages are copyright by Literary Classics of the United States, New York, NY and distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.  A daughter gave it to me yesterday and it has a lot I hope to read and some selections from books I have read such as two landmark books, Silent Spring, by Rachael Carson, and the earlier book by Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac.

My interest has probably been more in the environmental area than the evolution area.  My posts have emphasized evolution because there is more clarification needed there.  The environmentalists are mostly on the right track so I don't feel an obligation to write about it as much.

Joseph G. Engemann   Kalamazoo, Michigan  October 23, 2014

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