Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 18, 2015

choi

(1) Jeremy van Loon with Rebecca Penty, The Party’s Over in Alberta.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... nada-s-oil-industry

the first 1  ½ paragraphs:

“There’s a reason they call Alberta the Texas of the North. The province is home to Canada’s oil industry and produces more than three-quarters of the country’s crude. Cowboys are popular there. Each July, Calgary hosts the Stampede, a 10-day rodeo that’s one of the largest in the world. Alberta’s government also has deeply conservative, probusiness roots that predate the Republican Party’s ascension in the Lone Star State. The Progressive Conservatives have controlled Alberta’s provincial government since 1971, ushering in an era of loose regulation and low taxes that helped give rise to the development of Alberta’s vast tracts of tarlike oil sands.

“Now, there’s a new sheriff in town. On May 5, the liberal New Democratic Party won a general election, ending the conservatives’ four-decade reign and delivering a blow to the spiritual home of Canada’s conservative movement. The NDP’s brand of social democratic politics tends to favor things like subsidized day care and government job-creation schemes over low corporate tax rates. Leader and soon-to-be Premier Rachel Notley, a 51-year-old lawyer whose father ran the party in the 1970s, plans to make the oil industry pay up and fill a C$7 billion ($5.8 billion) budgetary gap for schools and hospitals—even after crude prices collapsed last year.

My comment:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: An election win by liberals strikes fear into the heart of Canada’s oil industry
(b) There is no need to read the rest.
(c) Alberta
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta
(Capital Edmonton; Largest City [by population, at 1.1m in 2011 census] Calgary; Athabasca oil sands [qv; named after Athabasca River, whose name has Indian origin])

choi

Alan Bjerga, Betting on Nature to Solve the Bee Crisis.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... olve-the-bee-crisis

Quote:

"The apple trees are blooming on Ken Simpelaar’s orchards in upstate New York * * * That’s drawn 38 species of bees, who spread pollen as they forage for nectar. For years, Simpelaar paid beekeepers to truck insects in. Then colony collapse disorder struck, triggering shortages of commercial honeybees at peak flowering times. Three years ago he stopped bringing in hives and found he didn’t see any change in his yields.

"Wild bee species including bumblebees and blue orchard bees nest alone rather than in hives. Research shows that if they’re given a chance to do their work [on apples and squash], they can keep many crops going just as well as commercially raised honeybees. * * * says Rachael Winfree, an entomologist at Rutgers University[,] 'But they [wild bees] get no credit. No one raises them. They live on the margins.' ”

"For some crops, including California’s $6.5 billion almond harvest, honeybees are crucial to keeping up industrial-scale production. For smaller crops, it turns out that maintaining untamed habitat near orchards is the key to getting a healthy population of native bees to stick around. Sherry Dudas, manager of Honey Brook Organic Farm in Pennington, N.J., which runs one of the largest community-supported agriculture programs in the country, says she and her husband are letting plants grow along streams on their property to attract more wild bees.

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: Research into colony collapse shows wild bees can help farmers
(b) Osmia lignaria
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmia_lignaria
(commonly known as blue orchard bee; makes nests in reeds and natural holes, creating individual cells for their brood that are separated by mud dividers)
(c) buzzybeegirl, Buzzy’s Guest Post. In Anna D Howell’s Anna's Bee World, Apr 3, 2011.
buzzybeegirl.wordpress.com
(“The bees in the photo are blue orchard bees (Osmia lignaria). They are cavity nesting bees, meaning that they nest in above ground cavities like dried stems or empty beetle holes in wood. They also use mud to create chambers between eggs, so each egg will have his or her own little compartment to develop in. You can see and example of the chambers here. Female bees will gather in places where mud is abundant and dig and dig until they gather some mud and roll it into a nice ball”)

(d) “Sherry Dudas, manager of Honey Brook Organic Farm in Pennington, NJ, which runs one of the largest community-supported agriculture programs in the country”
(i) Honey Brook Organic Farm
www.honeybrookorganicfarm.com/#

You know the concept. Subscribers get fresh vegetables regularly.
(ii) Pennington, New Jersey
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennington,_New_Jersey
(Edward Penington)

choi

(2) Alan Levin, The Perils of Flying Private.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... n-flying-commercial
(“Since 2000 there have been five times more fatal accidents in the U.S. involving private and chartered corporate planes than airliners. Investigators cited pilot error among the causes of 88 percent of those crashes”)

My comment:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: More people die flying private or charter than commercial--often because [charter] pilots aren’t caregful
(b) Read only the first three paragraphs.
(c) “ 'I’m kinda out of the loop,' [pilot Richard] Trammell told his co-pilot, Jeremy Hayden."

out of the loop (adj; etymology)
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/out_of_the_loop