By Dave Harcourt •
August 8, 2009
The scratching chickens that are found in and around many rural households provides cheap food at practically no cost - now its also happening in city and town houses in Europe and more recently the USA.
Bringing production to the household has no economy of scale but inputs including labour and part of the feed are essentially free. The reduction in transport and packaging cost have financial and environmental benefits.
Eggs from the Eglu
The Eglu is based on a plastic, waterproof box, where the hens shelter and lay their eggs. The box is attached to an enclosed run which can be placed on a lawn allowing the chickens to scratch for insects and grass. The run has a door to allow the hens a free range in the garden when its safe.
By Tina Casey •
June 2, 2009
Abandoned land mines have been called “the worst form of pollution on earth.” They kill up to 20,000 people every year, and according to one recent study it will take 450 years to find and clear all of them. That estimate might be too optimistic, because new mines can be laid as fast as the old ones are cleared. Ridding the world of land mines sounds like a Sisyphean task of epic proportions. Or is it? Enter DARPA (the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency) and the humble bee.
By Joe Mohr •
January 9, 2009
Try your hand at editorial humor. Enter a caption for this cartoon in the comments section below. A winner will be chosen and their caption will be published next week. Good luck!
By Jerry James Stone •
November 9, 2008
A UK Professor Hopes His Genetically Modified Worker Bees Can Help Stop The Colony Collapse Disorder That Is Grossly Effecting the UK Economy
Last week 140,000 protesters from the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) marched on Whitehall demanding $8-million in emergency funding from the Department for Environment to tackle alarming rates of bee decline. The decline has cost the UK economy about $54-million in the past year alone.
But British scientist
Francis Ratnieks — and the UK’s only professor of apiculture – is pioneering research that he hopes will assuage the hardship
beekeepers have been experiencing with
colony collapse disorder.
By Meg Hamill •
November 6, 2008
Britain’s government has been warned that the country will enter into an “agricultural disaster” unless more money is put towards discovering what is killing the country’s bees.
Protesters from the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA), dressed in traditional, white beekeeper suits, delivered a petition signed by more than 140,000 people to Downing Street today, calling for £8 million funding research into causes of the bee decline.
Over the past 12 months, one in three of Britain’s honey bee colonies – amounting to nearly two billion bees, have been lost. These losses are the greatest yet for the UK. The causes of the massive die-off are unclear, and the apiarists fear there is nothing to prevent a similar devastation in the year to come. The beekeepers claim that the Government is doing nothing to prevent it from happening.
