(Hat tip to my Lady-Love)

Apparently, Honey has found its place in Olympic gymnastics, but not as some sort of sugar energy-booster as you might think from all the honey-based candy energy bars you find in sport shops. Nope, Honey is being prized for its stickiness - Olympiads are using it to keep their hands stuck to their swing bars. Have a read.

On Monday, the 11th of August, I will be teaching a class on bees and beekeeping at the community center where I live on the UW-Madison campus. If anyone in Madison is reading, stop on by and learn about bees!

Class blurb:

Catch the Buzz About Honeybees!

Find out all you ever wanted to know about those busy little insects that pollinate our crops and turn nectar into Honey. Hobby Beekeeper and science enthusiast Karl J. Mogel will be teaching a class on all the fascinating little things we know about bees: Queens and workers, the “Bee Dance”, swarms, stingers, and the fun and challenges of beekeeping. And of course the best part, come spin some honey yourself and take it home in a jar!

This class is free and open to the public. It runs from 7-8 pm at the Eagle Heights Community Center on the UW-Madison campus. For information on how to get there, visit this map link.

Ariela and I just pulled a whole medium-depth honey super and four full-depth frames out of our hives today… time to wipe down the centrifuge - it’s honey extracting time!

Wow, what a week. After finishing a sequencing plate at work on Tuesday, Ariela and I were off to California to finish planning for an incredible party on Saturday. I must have had too much fun or too much to drink, because I think some scientist nabbed me and affixed a tracking device to my left hand. Ariela got one exactly like it too. Maybe we’re part of some sociologists’s study of pair bonded humans. Anybody ever seen anything like this shiny metal band before? Read More…

Ariela and I went to go check on our bees today (I didn’t write a post about them? OK I will soon!), and it looks like they’re doing fine, considering. A feral colony that has lived for years in the wall of a barn, had a rocky late-season start (hived in late July), I was getting worried. But all is fine - and now I’ve got some news about my bees! Read More…

It’s not like I watch cable TV directly. But I support the current strike by the Hollywood Writers. Why?

There’s a metric ass-load of crap produced out there. On TV and in the theaters. I’ve gone to one crappy movie too much and regretted not buying a book on philosophy with the movie instead. I’ve sat through way too many crappy sitcoms and other TV shows when I was younger. I’ve watched with dismay as “Reality TV” shows cropped up and people ate them up without thinking. Because not a lot of thinking goes into it all. Read More…

Check out this article in the New York Times, that calls hobby beekeepers “Warriors Against a Plague.” As I have argued (and got quoted in The Aggie) before, genetic diversity of honeybees may be important in diseases such as CCD. Glad to know that keeping a few honeybee colonies makes me a repository for local genetic varieties, and therefore, a warrior against current and future bee maladies. Here’s the article. I also have a thought about future beekeeping. Read More…

I just came across this article in Scientific American, and I have to get back to work and pull some PCR reactions out of the thermocycler downstairs, but it looks pretty exciting. I’ll post more about it later, but here’s a summary and a link. Read More…

Episode 72 of the Mindcast is up!

Download it here. Read More…

I was browsing around today, reading what a few people had to say on genetically engineered crops, as I usually do from time to time. I eventually found myself on the website of the Organic Consumers Association, and besides several questionable unreferences articles here and there, I found a hum-dinger. Give Bees a Chance - Ban Genetically Engineered Crops. It was reproduced from TheSimon.com. Care to see how dumb it is? Read More…

I got interviewed a few weeks ago for KCRW’s Good Food, way down in Santa Monica, CA. Turns out they wanted to hear about what it’s like raising honeybees, and I got a few words in about the complex flavors of honey, to what’s good about the public reaction to CCD, and they really wanted to know what “Bee Bread” was. You’ll just have to listen Saturday morning at 11 AM PST to find out what that is. Here’s the link to the episode.

They’ll be linking back, or reading my website URL, so I’ll be sure to welcome their listeners with a few good things, how about a food-focused Mindcast episode or two?