100 Christmas and Children's Tales- $1!!!!!!

Toinette and the Elves - Susan Coolidge
The Voyage of the Wee Red Cap. By Ruth Sawyer Durand
A Story of the Christ-Child (a German Legend for Christmas Eve) - Elizabeth Harrison
Jimmy Scarecrow's Christmas - Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Why the Chimes Rang - Raymond McAlden
The Birds'Christmas (founded on fact) - F.E. Mann
The Little Sister's Vacation - Winifred M. Kirkland
Little Wolff's Wooden Shoes - Francois Coppee, adapted and translated by Alma J. Foster
Christmas in the Alley - Olive Thorne Miller
A Christmas Star - Katherine Pyle
The Queerest Christmas - Grace Margaret Gallaher
Old Father Christmas - J.H. Ewing
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
How Christmas Came to the Santa Maria Flats - Elia W. Peattie
The Legend of Babouscka - From the Russian Folk Tale
Christmas in the Barn - F. Arnstein
The Philanthropist's Christmas - James Weber Linn
The First Christmas-Tree - Lucy Wheelock
The First New England Christmas - G.L. Stone and M.G. Fickett
The Cratchits' Christmas Dinner - Charles Dickens
Christmas in Seventeen Seventy-Six - Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
Christmas Under the Snow - Olive Thorne Miller
Mr. Bluff's Experience of Holidays - Oliver Bell Bunce
Master Sandy's Snapdragon - Elbridge S. Brooks
A Christmas Fairy - John Strange Winter
The Greatest of These - Joseph Mills Hanson
Little Gretchen and the Wooden Shoe - Elizabeth Harrison
Big Rattle - Theodore Goodridge Roberts

AND

50 Children’s Christian Stories-that teach values from the Bible

Daddy the Superhero
Sharks
The Window in Time
Bad Imaginary Friend
The Rumor with Furry Feet
Fat Wally and the Piggies

AND MANY MORE!!!

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The Buzz About Bees

© CI
The small creatures that pollinate our crops help keep our food chain intact.
© CI
Charities in Zanzibar are working to improve beekeeping and honey harvesting techniques.
© Mitsuhiko Imamori/Minden Pictures
You can help save the pollinators by taking our Bee Good to the Planet Pledge!

Oct. 19, 2007: With partners, CI is helping to conserve key bee habitats on three continents. By protecting these areas, we are protecting the small creatures that pollinate our crops and keep our food chain intact. A donation from McDonald’s will support our efforts in South Africa and Mexico.

Africa: South Africa
In South Africa, we work with farmers, municipalities and communities to help them set aside bee habitat on their land. These landscapes contain hundreds of plant species – many pollinated by bees – that are important for horticultural, cut flower, food and medicinal extract markets. Setting aside blocks of native vegetation ensures that bees survive the cold winter months and continue to pollinate throughout the year, protecting the agricultural and tourism economy as well as biological diversity.

CI-South Africa is also working with a private diamond mining company to restore previously mined land to bee-friendly habitat. The restoration work will bring jobs to local people who have lost their jobs as mines have shut down.

Africa: Kenya
Scientists in Kenya are experimenting with ways to diversify local livelihoods by harvesting honey from stingless bees that are native to the region.

With support from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), of which CI is a member, the International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) has introduced special hives to communities neighboring the coastal forests of East Africa. Local farmers have also been taught how to harvest the honey, which fetches a higher market price because it is hypoallergenic. Communities then have a direct incentive to protect these forests, ensuring their long-term conservation.

Africa: Zanzibar
On the spice island of Zanzibar off mainland Tanzania’s east coast, CEPF is supporting projects that help local communities generate income through protecting their natural resources. Among many projects run by two leading charities, CARE and the Wildlife Conservation Society, people are using funds to improve beekeeping and honey harvesting techniques. As a result, they are getting greater financial returns.

“In order to have bees that make honey, you’ve got to have flowers and you’ve got to have trees,” says Kirstin Siex, project director at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “It’s a win-win situation all around.”

Central America: Mexico
With eight of 11 families of bees found in Mexico, the country exports more honey than every other nation except for China and the United States.

Beekeeping is the bread and butter of communities living within or around Mexico’s key bee habitat. This is the case at the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, roughly 2 million acres of tropical forest in southeast Mexico. More than 80 communities, many of Mayan descent, surround the reserve and make their living from raising bees.

CI and our partners are working with two beekeeping communities that own and manage forested areas bordering the reserve themselves. We are developing a manual on best practices in honey production, which will be used for training 50 honey producers in each community. There are plans to make the manual available to other villages with the hopes of eventually reaching about 1,000 producers. Our overall efforts will help raise local awareness about the vital roles bees play in ecosystems and the nutritional value of honey.

Asia: China
In parts of southwest China, bees and people are longtime friends. CI and partners are monitoring the protection of two nature reserves in the region that are prime habitat for bees and other wildlife.

For decades, communities living near the Wanglang Nature Reserve in Sichuan province have relied on the forest to meet their daily needs. But over time, the reserve has suffered from continued logging and wildlife poaching by local people. In help reduce the strain on the people and the land, the reserve is working with communities on honey-related projects, building on an old tradition of honey made from local herbs and wild bees. The honey is produced using 70 different kinds of rare traditional Chinese medicinal herbs and flowers. Because of its excellent quality, Carrefour orders the honey product every harvest season for its grocery stores across China.

A long history of cultivating honey bees continues at another nature reserve, the Gaoligongshan, in western Yunnan province. The reserve conserves important wild bee habitat, as many plants here can produce honey. With several ethnic communities in the region, the nature reserve is trying to improve honey production, which in turn, will improve local livelihoods. Scientists also estimate that coffee plantations near Gaoligongshan enjoy higher yields as a result of healthy wild bee populations.

Related Links:
> Get Involved: Take our Bee Good to the Planet Pledge!
> Feature: Vanishing Bees
> Feature: Interesting Things About Small Things
> Partner Profile: McDonald's

What Was Behind the Honey Bee Wipeout?

By Gina Covina, Terrain. Posted October 16, 2007.

Everyone has a theory why the honeybees started dying off. Try malnutrition.
Truckloads of bees begin to arrive as early as November from all over the nation -- it takes virtually all of this country's commercially operated pollination colonies to cover California's almonds. While the bees roll down the highways, hive entrances boarded up, or wait in Central Valley bee yards for the trees to bloom, they're fed a mixture of high fructose corn syrup meant to replace nectar, along with soy protein meant to replace pollen. (Some beekeepers, Wilson among them, have switched to beet syrup as a safer though more expensive alternative.) Oliver sums up the patent absurdity: "When bugs from the east coast have to be trucked to California to pollinate an exotic tree because California has no bugs, it's a pretty whacked-out agricultural system."

On Alan Wilson's table at the Oakland Farmers' Market, row after row of glass honey jars catch the early morning sun that angles down Ninth Street. Some of the honey gleams a reddish brown, some a paler amber, depending on the particular mix of flower species the bees foraged. All of it was produced by Wilson's colonies, which number a third of what he had last fall, before the infamous bee die-off that afflicted growers around the world. "I'd better get the honey while I can," one customer remarks.

The flurry of media attention given this winter's bee losses, now labeled "colony collapse disorder," has updated the world of bees for a heretofore-clueless public. Our image of honeybees is a lot like our bucolic images of farm animals -- and just as far from the brutal truth of today's corporate agriculture. We picture fields of clover, blossoming orchards, the wildflowers beneath the trees, filled with happy bees industriously gathering nectar and pollen to take back to the hive. As the bees gather pollen, they transfer it from plant to plant, thus assuring cross-pollination.

Fewer people can picture what happens at the hive, where the bees feed the protein-rich pollen to their developing brood. The adults live on honey they make from collected nectar -- sipped from the throats of flowers into the bees' honey stomachs, disgorged at the hive into the hexagonal wax combs made by the bees, fanned by bee wings to evaporate excess moisture until it reaches the perfect syrupy consistency, and then sealed with a wax cap to keep it clean and ready to sustain the colony over the winter. In order to do all this, bees rely on a diverse range of flowers blooming over a wide stretch of the year.

The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a European native, one of very few bee species in the world to store honey in bulk and live fulltime in large colonies (30,000 to 100,000 individuals). It is the only bee with a long history of intensive management by people. For almost all of this time, and continuing today in many parts of the world, the rosy picture of bee life painted above is largely accurate. But when beekeeping meets industrial agriculture, the result is very different. Colony collapse disorder may have many contributing causes, but it comes down to bees hitting the biological limits of our agricultural system. It's not so much a bee crisis as a pollination crisis. And we may end up calling it agricultural collapse disorder.

It's a rare beekeeper in the United States who can survive by selling honey. The trade loophole that has flooded this country with low-cost Chinese honey for the past ten years guaranteed that (fortunately for beekeepers, that hole has just been plugged by new federal tariff regulations). The only income remaining has been in pollination services. Alan Wilson's bees are rented out for almond pollination starting in February. After that they go south to the orange groves, then all the way to North Dakota where they make clover honey. Wilson's Central Valley location near Merced has little to offer bees over the dry summer months except roadside star thistle and the brief flowering of cantaloupes in August. Nearby agricultural chemicals are a concern, especially the defoliant used on cotton before harvest. Just the drift from the defoliant has taken the paint off Wilson's hives. Still, this year he plans to keep his bees closer to home where he can manage them more intensively and try to increase their numbers.

Bees v. SUVS

Bees took to the streets of Berkeley, California, swarming an SUV before the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, in hopes of attracting quality legal and policy help to their cause.

The bees appealed to humans to be better planetary citizens: stop driving and immediately switch to local, organic agriculture, they said.

The bees announced that they would not participate in pollination until their demands were met, with the exception of small organic farms.

Wanted: Citizen scientists to help track wild bees in Illinois

Honey bee colonies are in decline in many states, but little is known about their wild cousins, the bumble bees, or, for that matter, honey bees living on their own in the wild without beekeepers.

Anzeige

A new initiative from the University of Illinois seeks to build a better record of honey bee and bumble bee abundance and distribution in Illinois by recruiting citizen scientists to report on wild bees seen anywhere in the state.

Beginning Thursday (Oct. 4) the BeeSpotter Web site will connect bee enthusiasts to resources that will help them identify local bees, post photographs and enter geographic information about wild bees seen in backyards, parks or other Illinois locales.

U. of I. entomology professor and department head May Berenbaum will announce the Web site launch during a presentation at the Chicago Cultural Center on Thursday. Her presentation, on the ongoing pollinator crisis in North America, will describe the widespread decline in the viability of animals that transport pollen and allow most of the planet’s flowering plants to reproduce.

Berenbaum has testified before Congress on colony collapse disorder, a mysterious malady of North American honey bees. She also chaired the National Research Council committee that reported this year on the status of pollinators in North America.

The idea for the BeeSpotter Web site emerged from recommendations in that study, Berenbaum said. A key finding was that too little information on pollinator abundance and distribution has been collected, particularly in the U.S.

“We don’t know what is going on with pollinators because America has never deemed it important enough to try to keep track of its pollination resources,” Berenbaum said.

“Given that 90 crops in the U.S. agricultural sector depend on a single species of pollinator, and other crops depend on other pollinators, it would seem that for economic reasons alone this has been a serious oversight on our part,” she said.

There are too few pollination experts in the U.S. to bridge the data gap, she said. The new Web site seeks to address the problem by involving citizen scientists in bee-monitoring efforts. Participants will feed their information into a database, interact with experts in the field who will answer their questions and connect them to other resources, such as the Illinois Natural History Survey database of North American bees.

BeeSpotter will provide a bee family tree, with biographies of the honey bee and each of the 12 species of bumble bees in Illinois. It will include a summary of the status of North American pollinators, with visual keys for identifying bees and distinguishing them from other insects. A data entry site will allow visitors to post digital photos, plot the location and describe the characteristics of bees they have seen.

More content will be added to the Web site throughout the fall, including information about the honey bee genome, the economic impact of bees, how to avoid and treat bee stings and how to build a bee-friendly garden.

Honey Bees - Life Cycle

The life cycle of a honey bee is presented as an example of complete metamorphosis, the development of an insect from egg to larva, then pupa, then adult. Moths, butterflies and wasps also develop with complete metamorphosis. Some aspects of beekeeping are also discussed.

Weather May Account for Reduced Honey Crop

By Jane Black

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 10, 2007; Page A05

That the 2007 honey crop has been disappointing won't surprise anyone who has picked up the newspaper in recent months. Since early spring, colony collapse disorder (CCD), a disease that causeshoneybees to suddenly, mysteriously disappear from their hives, has made headlines around the world. Without honeybees to pollinate, experts warn that one-third of the food supply -- from apples and peaches to cucumbers and squash -- is at risk.

It's a frightening prospect. And though signs of CCD were first reported in the United States and most cases have been reported here, European beekeepers have recently observed a similar phenomenon, and possible cases have been reported in Taiwan.

Scientists and beekeepers have floated a variety of theories for the collapses -- from stress caused when commercial beekeepers move their hives long distances to disorientation caused by cellphone radiation. Last week, the journal Science published a report that found a new virus, Israeli acute paralysis virus, appeared to be associated with CCD.

But some experts say the more likely reason for this year's weak honey crop, which the NationalHoney Board says is on track to be smaller than last year's below-par 155 million pounds, is something much more obvious: the weather. In the South, drought and wildfires have prevented flowers from blooming. In the Midwest, a late freeze brought nectar flows in many areas almost to a halt. And in California, the country's No. 2 honey producer, coastal beekeepers reported that there were almost no flowering plants in July. The bees were fed sugar water to keep them from starving.

"It's more weather than CCD," said Ted Dennard, president of the Savannah Bee Company, which sells specialty honeys. "The reports I'm getting is that everywhere is under-producing. Tupelo was somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of normal production, and there's not a drop of star thistle in Idaho."

Extreme weather is becoming increasingly common across the globe, numerous studies suggest. That's why new research by Wayne Esaias, a Maryland biological oceanographer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who keeps bees as a hobby, has piqued enormous interest among bee experts and honey lovers. By taking simple measurements on when his bees started and stopped collecting nectar near his home in Highland, Esaias has shown that flowers there are blooming three weeks earlier than they did in 1992 and a month before they did in 1970. (The research, which has not yet been published, is posted at http://honeybeenet.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sites/regional_map.htm.)

Even with a limited data set, it's a potentially significant climate shift. If backyard beekeepers collected similar data at sites across the country, the results could offer clues about how to manage bee colonies to maximize honey production and, potentially, help keep bees healthy enough to resist diseases, such as the mysterious CCD.

"What this has demonstrated is that with simple measurements, you can bring all the information together and get a sense of the bigger picture," said Dewey Caron, a professor of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware. "I'm kind of ashamed I didn't think of it first."

Esaias, though, is the first to admit that it took him a long time -- 15 years -- to see that there might be a useful connection between his professional knowledge of weather and climate and his after-work beekeeping hobby.

It all started in 1991 when, without asking permission, his 12-year-old son offered to make a home for the hives of his Boy Scout troop leader, who was leaving the area. Along with the hives, the Esaias family inherited an old platform scale. At the troop leader's instruction, Esaias placed the hives on the scale in the back yard.

Each night in honey season, they would record the hives' weight. The heavier the hive, the more nectar had been collected. "I'd never kept bees before, so it was a good management tool," Esaias remembered. "It helped you figure out when to get ready for the honey and when to take the honey off."

His two children became avid beekeepers, keeping records for their 4-H club and selling honey out the back door. Over the years, Esaias, who today has 17 hives, noticed that the bees behaved differently during El Nino years, when the winter is milder and the summers are wetter.

In early 2006, Esaias decided to look for patterns. He dug up spotty records from 1922, 1923 and 1957 on when flowers first bloomed in the Washington area, and good, consistent ones from the Smithsonian beginning in 1970. His analysis showed that the plants were blooming a full month earlier now than they had been in 1970. There had been no apparent change between 1922 and 1970.

Esaias stresses that real climate analysis requires long, continuous records, so it's possible this is normal weather variability. But his hypothesis is that the change is the result of the area's rapid urbanization. As more buildings and roads are built, the temperature climbs and plants bloom earlier.

This spring, he enlisted the help of 15 other beekeepers in Washington and in the Maryland suburbs. Initial results show a 15-day gap between nectar production in Chevy Chase and 20 miles away in Highland.

"There's a lot of variability within the natural system. The scary part is the long-term trend and the implications of that change," Esaias said.

To find out what that might be, Esaias has applied for NASA funding that would allow him to overlay his data with information from NASA satellites that chart weather and vegetation patterns.

"Bees are such great environmental samplers. When they go out and forage, they go almost two miles away from the hive. That's a very large area, about 2,500 acres, and the same size as the grid elements of a lot of climate ecosystem models," Esaias said. "I'm wondering if there's a way we could look at when the plants produce nectar, and use the satellite data and ecosystem models so we're in a better position to understand how climate change will affect pollination."

So are other entomologists, such as Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California at Davis. Mussen believes the reason bees got "whacked" by CCD is malnutrition, which is directly connected to the weather. If honeybees cannot collect enough nectar to feed themselves, they won't have the strength to resist disease.

"If we're headed into rougher weather, as it appears we are, we'll have more difficulties with our bees," Mussen said. "It won't matter if you're a backyard beekeeper or someone with 10,000 colonies."

Both types of beekeepers will have the opportunity to contribute if Esaias's research moves forward.

"This is a perfect example of how citizen science can work," said the University of Delaware's Caron. "Lots of people can come in and contribute small amounts of data. You get immediate feedback on your bees and the satisfaction that you are contributing to a larger picture."