Ooh, borage flowers. Dunno about bees, but the ants where I grew up loved them… they’d take the seeds back to their nests under the paving stones out of the back of the house and forget about them so the plants would sprout up everywhere. The petal (is there a word for a flower where there’s one single petal sheet that’s subdivided into petal-lets?) is tasty, and wikipedia alleges that it is one of the few naturally edible blue things. So that’s interesting.
If you find out that the presentation has been recorded and is available online, you will post links, right?
vytautasjanaauskassays
I’m pretty sure those are called rapeseed.
moarscienceplzsays
Sorry PZ, but ice skating while still inside your car is not a favorite sport of mine.
justsomeguysays
@4 you’ll only skate a short distance, right into the 8-foot-tall snowdrift that materialized in the middle of the road.
Ariaflame, BSc, BF, PhDsays
Is that what they call canola over here in Australia?
Chelydrasays
The topic doesn’t really make sense to me. Bees can’t live in fields of annual crops because most species overwinter in the ground and so can’t survive tilling. The problem still comes back to that farming destroys bee habitat; the loss of bee food sources is also caused by this, but providing better flowers doesn’t solve the primary problem.
anym says
Ooh, borage flowers. Dunno about bees, but the ants where I grew up loved them… they’d take the seeds back to their nests under the paving stones out of the back of the house and forget about them so the plants would sprout up everywhere. The petal (is there a word for a flower where there’s one single petal sheet that’s subdivided into petal-lets?) is tasty, and wikipedia alleges that it is one of the few naturally edible blue things. So that’s interesting.
Gregory in Seattle says
If you find out that the presentation has been recorded and is available online, you will post links, right?
vytautasjanaauskas says
I’m pretty sure those are called rapeseed.
moarscienceplz says
Sorry PZ, but ice skating while still inside your car is not a favorite sport of mine.
justsomeguy says
@4 you’ll only skate a short distance, right into the 8-foot-tall snowdrift that materialized in the middle of the road.
Ariaflame, BSc, BF, PhD says
Is that what they call canola over here in Australia?
Chelydra says
The topic doesn’t really make sense to me. Bees can’t live in fields of annual crops because most species overwinter in the ground and so can’t survive tilling. The problem still comes back to that farming destroys bee habitat; the loss of bee food sources is also caused by this, but providing better flowers doesn’t solve the primary problem.