BMA Alumni Weekend!

Finally it is here! I have always enjoyed coming to alumni weekend at BMA. Listening to the band play Battle Hymn of the Republic dreaming I was playing too! This year at BMA I have been playing French horn in band and love it. I will be playing as I dreamed tomorrow. If you have never heard bma play, then you are in for an awesome treat! We also have a marching group. They march in with the banners of the honor classes that have graduated from bma. It truly is amazing!

Whats killing the bees?

Recently While researching about bees I found this out! I thought it might interest you!

source: http://calitreview.com/1512

Flowers are the sexual organs of plants. Most contain both pollen (plant sperm) and ovaries. For a plant to reproduce, it needs to somehow transfer its pollen to the ovaries of another member of the same species. For hundreds of millions of years, plants used the wind to do this. It’s like Internet spam: send hundreds of millions of flyweight grains of pollen in all directions, hoping that just one or two finds its way by chance to the right ovary. Many plants, such as pine and birch trees and the dreaded ragweed, still use wind pollination.

But about a hundred million years ago, one class of plants hit upon a revolutionary idea: Why not use insects to transport the pollen instead of wind? That way, you can make much bigger, heavier, more sophisticated pollen packages. And you can make far fewer of them if you can rely on the insects to travel more or less directly to another flower of your species. The showy flowers we see all around us are the strategy for making that happen: They are designed to attract insects through form, color, and scent, and they have wells of nectar for the insects to drink when they visit. The insects swoop in for a few pints, get sticky pollen all over their hairy bodies, and inadvertently transfer some of this pollen to the next flower they visit. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. The fertilized seed becomes a fruit or nut.

Bees are the world’s pollination masters; they have developed sophisticated sensory apparatus for finding flowers, special bodies designed to collect and transport pollen, and complex social intelligence that allows them to share information and allocate their resources so that a single hive of honeybees can cross-pollinate 25 million flowers in a single day. A good bit of the flowering world (and the animals that rely on the fruits made by this flowering world) have come to depend on them.

I was shocked! A friend of ours Lost over 100 Hives this winter and is buying 100 new ones! I wish him the best of luck!