Waxworms make Holey Shopping Bags

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Roger Gosden

A shameless boast, I take fewer than a dozen plastic shopping bags home from the grocery store each year (a trillion are manufactured). Discarded in garbage for burial in landfill, this non-compostable stuff awaits a post-Homo sapiens archeologist who learns how Anthropocene people trashed their planet. But beekeepers have another option for disposing of polyethylene. A dead hive. Not really practicable, but the idea connects with a new channel for Earth care.

When a bee colony deserted the hive, I saved the frames containing honey, boarded the entrance, and didn’t return to clean the interior for several weeks.

I was gobsmacked when I opened the boxes. The combs eaten to shreds were festooned in silken threads. Wax moths had snuck inside.

Galleria mellonella

One hungry waxworm (Pixabay)

Greater wax moths (Galleria mellonella), originating in Asia and now worldwide, depend on beehives to reproduce. Their eggs turn into plumptious caterpillars gorging on beeswax, and only a strong colony can beat back the invaders. Along with mites and hive beetles, wax moths are the bane of beekeepers.

A few years ago, biologists noticed holes appearing in plastic bags used to collect waxworms. Trained to be inquisitive, they set up an experiment, finding the plastic was eaten at a rate of 2 holes per worm-hour. Their results were published and another paper appeared in Current Biology.

They spun some in a blender to test the effects of caterpillar mush on plastic. It degraded. So, the plastic was digested, not just chewed. It is likely that bacteria in their gut were responsible, and the process probably benefited them by generating energy for metabolism. The long chains of hydrocarbon that make polyethylene turned into ethylene glycol, a substance used as an antifreeze in automobile radiators that is rather toxic to us, although it degrades quickly in soil.

There are unrelated bacteria that digest plastic, albeit slowly. Neither they nor waxworms can consume the mountains of plastic we generate, but that a synthetic compound formerly thought to be stable for eons is biodegradable gives hope that genetic engineering will develop a more efficient agent. Perhaps that can soften absolutist objections some people have toward GMOs.

New Post: He who Pays the Pipeline Calls the Tune

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What Hatidze Knows

Posted on March 13, 2020 by Roger Gosden

A woman in a desolate corner of North Macedonia claimed to be the last wild beekeeper in Europe made a splash at the Oscars. Her story told in Honeyland took three years to produce on a slim budget and was never expected to win acclaim. I rate movies by how long they stay in my head. Five minutes? Five hours? This time it was still ringing the next day. I recommend watching it.

In the first scene we watch Hatidze Muratova, a vigorous woman of about 50 years old and ethnically Turkic, climbing a rocky precipice to check a bee colony. She removes a covering stone with bare hands to reveal a yellow honeycomb covered with bees. The insects would normally attack an intruder, but not her.

Her life in a deserted village was a spartan existence in a stone shack. It might have been otherwise for the able and intelligent woman, but her father forbade marriage because the youngest daughter was expected to stay with aged parents at home. He had passed away and now she cared for a bedridden mother (who dies). A hard tradition, but Hatidze was happy and obviously sociable at the Skopje market where she bartered jars of honey.

When a family of nomads turned up with a herd of cattle to settle among the ruins of the village, the story moves from the tenderness of home to a tense relationship with new neighbors. They are poor but their lives are more turbulent from poor decisions. Since Hatidze made her living from beekeeping, they hoped to make more income by building an apiary. Later in the season when honeycomb should be saved for the bees in winter they harvested all the honey, forcing their starving bees raid Hatidze’s hives.

She was friendly with one of the sons, teaching him the art of beekeeping. Her philosophy was to take half the honey for herself and leave the rest for them. The boy took the message home, but his father didn’t listen.

This is not just the story of a fascinating character struggling to manage relationships. It was her elementary philosophy that stayed in my head—take half and leave half. It’s a fine mantra for earth care.

For countless thousands of years humans had a negligible impact on earth. Our numbers were low and technology was primitive. The lives of hunter gatherers were probably short, but they lived sustainably. Neolithic people gave up nomadism for settlements where they grew crops and grazed animals. These were more prosperous times but living closer to each other and to their animals promoted disease, theft and a social hierarchy. Choices require trade-offs.

Settlement meant the ability to store harvests and accumulate wealth, so greed and excess are corollaries. Not satisfied with sufficiency, forests are chopped down, sea-beds scraped by trawlers and valuable ore mined to exhaustion for maximum profit regardless of the interests of future generations. The beekeeper of Bekirlija leads a wiser life that seems no less happy for not being conventionally rich.

Next Post: Wax moths—Foes have Virtues too

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Clean Water Matters

Posted on March 7, 2020 by Roger Gosden

When we turn on a faucet we assume the water is safe to drink. It’s not a safe assumption in many countries, of course, but regarded here as an unwritten right and safeguarded by public officials (Ahem, what about Flint, Michigan?).

Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972 to prohibit the discharge of pollutants into the “waters of the United States.” Unfortunately, the drafters didn’t define “waters.” The Ohio and Mississippi rivers are obviously included, but how far up their tributaries does protection extend?

And now with an Administration bent on watering down regulations we are in a strange phase of history when gains in public health and the environment are being reversed. The EPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are now more anemic agents. Our polity has deteriorated so far that challenges end up for courts to decide. It would be comforting to believe that states will compensate with wiser decisions as they are closer to people affected. But rivers are no respecters of boundaries, so an upstream offender sends pollution down to neighboring states.

Stream and waterfall in West Virginia Allegheny MountainsOur region of the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia is the origin of several great rivers. Some 60% of headwater streams feeding into them run as trickles or dry out except after heavy rain or snow melt (like our waterfall illustrated). They are not protected waters, and their purity depends on sensitive stewardship by landowners.

Six years ago there was a chemical spill in the Elk River that left hundreds of thousands of people in nine counties without potable water for months. It was the third spill in the valley in 5 years, only a short distance from the state capitol that almost overlooks the Kanawha River into which the Elk discharged pollution from a leaking storage tank. House Bill 4079 now proposes to exempt standards for released contaminants more than a defined distance upstream of public water intakes. Aarhh!

Most pollutants are probably harmless, but how can we be sure? And even if human health is unaffected, fish and other aquatic life may suffer. We only test chemicals known or suspected to cause harm, and special interests can push back from expanding the list. This is happening now as the WV legislature debates PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances). The CDC acknowledges these substances used for coating products by manufacturers, the military and firefighting stations accumulate in the environment because they are stable.

They are among synthetic chemicals called endocrine disruptors that mimic or antagonize natural hormones in the body, potentially causing chronic and malignant diseases, fertility problems and birth defects. Some of them are active at extremely low levels. This is a relatively new area of research, and a subject I currently teach to college students. A community study near Parkersburg, West Virginia, found a probable link between a type of PFAS and several diseases, but testing one chemical at a time is a losing battle. For well over a century, chemists have been synthesizing novel chemicals that now number over 80 thousand. We desperately need high-throughput methods for testing them.

Next Post: What Hatidze Knows

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The Dawn Chorus—Requiem for a Birder

Posted on February 28, 2020 by Roger Gosden

The last hour of the night seems darkest after tossing and turning to wake from strange dreams with a pounding heart. But there is a spell that can cast off the pall if we listen at an open window in the stillness of a spring morning.

The dawn chorus begins. Not only is there enchantment with the ancient symphony, but moments at peace with nature that help to face challenges of a new day.

The choir begins shortly before light in the east. A northern cardinal chants, wait, wait, wait … chew, chew, chew, chew from a favorite perch in the holly tree. He is joined by the baroque melody of a brown thrasher in a tulip poplar. A Carolina wren poking in a woodpile scratches notes even higher than top E on a violin. They are accompanied by a wood thrush in the back forty playing the flute and a piliated woodpecker drumming a staccato percussion on a hollow tree. The soaring music fades the terrors of a retreating night.

Northern cardinal

Northern cardinal: courtesy of Inge Curtis

This was a time the birder loved most of all. He rose before dawn to listen to the choir outside and watch for them coming for refreshment to his feeder as the gloaming turned to daylight.

He was old enough to notice the chorus was less dazzling than in his youth, and each year fewer of these friends visited his garden. He nodded gravely at news we have three billion fewer birds in North America today than in 1970, including many common backyard species.

And now the birder has gone, too. “Nothing stays, all changes,” wrote Virginia Woolf. That is a fine maxim for evolution, and a fact we have to accept without consolation.

Spring has not become silent. There are still birds that sing the same songs and as soulfully as ever. But tunes played by fewer pipers or a lonely bugler at dawn are received by those who remember glorious concerts more as elegies now for those we loved and lost.

To Geoff and his feathery friends: Requiem aeternam dona eis. ♬

Next Post: Keep our streams clean

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My Neighbor's Maple Syrup Sugar Shack

Posted on February 21, 2020 by Roger Gosden

There’s a family I know in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia that has made maple syrup for over a century. As they are now short-handed of youngsters leaving for city work and the retainers get older and frailer, I offered to help this year.

I sat down with Gary in his sugar shack. He is the older of two brothers who manage the operation. They had already checked the network of tubes tapped into sugar maple trees that crisscross the wooded slopes. The sap runs along the plastic channels toward a main line to finally reach a large tank outside the shack.

“In the past we tapped each tree separately,” he told me. “Before we left for school, while it was still dark, we had to bring down heavy buckets full of sap from the woods.”

“I guess winters were harder in those days,” I said. “This is another mild one.”

“Oh yeah. It started snowing in November and the ground was covered until March, even April. Blizzards piled snow high as fence posts.”

His brother Ronnie came inside. As first I didn’t recognize him in the dense steam filling the room.

“Hi. We need the extractor to clear the air,” he said, wafting a hand to clear the fog.

“I’m up for that,” I chipped in. “When your family started making syrup was it to supplement farm income in winter?”

“Not at all.” It was Gary who replied. “What our Granddaddy made was the only source of sweetness for the family. He never bought sugar at the store.”

“Nowadays, we only make it to keep the tradition going, and sales just about cover our costs,” Ronnie added.

Before we fixed the extractor on the tin roof, I brought in some logs from the huge pile they had cut and split last year. It’s cheaper to boil sap over wood fires than use electric or gas heaters. There’s no shortage of wood in and around the Monongahela forest.

Much of their equipment is homemade and looks antique. Harvesting sap doesn’t cost a penny when it runs by gravity and is boiled with local wood, but costly in time and effort. The fluid is fed into a large tank over the first fire which is kept alight around the clock. If it starts foaming Ronnie squirts from a proprietary bottle to raise the surface tension. In the old days they used a piece of bacon. The warmed sap passes to the evaporator, the most modern part of the system, where it bubbles over a second fire and generate clouds of steam. 100 gallons of sap is concentrated to about 2 gallons of syrup. We threw logs on the fires every half hour to keep them hot. Ronnie checked the specific gravity of the liquor with a hydrometer (looking like a long thermometer): the optimum is a narrow band.

sugar shack for making maple syrup in West Virginia

It’s obvious when a sugar shack is making maple syrup. While one chimney smokes from a log fire another belches steam from the evaporator. The process runs for up to a month.

I asked Gary to explain the daily cycle.

“Sap don’t flow at night cos of freezin, but starts when it warm up.”

When a tree gets warmer its interior pressure rises and sap flows up the xylem tubes to drip out of holes tapped through the bark, like blood oozing out of a wound. The sugar synthesized in the leaves by photosynthesis the previous summer has been stored in the tree as starch (a polymer of glucose). As spring approaches it is mobilized ahead of the season of growing shoots and leaves, and very slightly sweetens the sap. The yellow-bellied sapsucker knows this too as it drills holes in smaller boughs. When the bird returns it may find an insect in the sticky sap, and enjoy the protein morsel in a carbohydrate sauce in dead of winter.

During cold weather tree roots remain unfrozen and soil moisture is drawn into them by the process of osmosis to generate “root pressure.” Sap rises up the tree in the xylem. That’s the principle, although plant physiology is more complicated. I love to see a family honoring a time-honored process using equipment and principles I can understand in an era when the technology I use is beyond my comprehension. Besides, making maple syrup is a gentle art that does no harm to trees or wildlife.

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