Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Did my multiple clicking. Care2 doesn't seem to care anymore about how many clicks you do. Hope Stradee and Danon have a particularly enjoyable day. Overcast here and cool.

ovember 24, 2010

Give Thanks for ... Eel?

By JAMES PROSEK

Easton, Conn.

AS the story goes, Squanto — a Patuxet Indian who had learned English — took pity on the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony who had managed to survive that first brutal winter, and showed them how to plant corn, putting a dead fish in each hole where a seed was planted. But before that, before the ground had even fully thawed, he taught them a perhaps more valuable skill: how to catch a fatty, nutritious fish that would sustain them in the worst of winters. And this food item, likely on the table of that first Thanksgiving, would have carried special significance to those remaining colonists. Eels — a forgotten staple of our forefathers.

Indeed, eel was the dinner that Pilgrims were given on the very day after they made peace with Massasoit, the sachem, or leader, of the region. The following account is from “Mourt’s Relation,” mostly written by a Plymouth resident, Edward Winslow: “Squanto went at noon to fish for eels. At night he came home with as many as he could well lift in one hand, which our people were glad of. They were fat and sweet. He trod them out with his feet, and so caught them with his hands without any other instrument.”

Eels don’t like cold water, and spend the winter balled up, bodies twisted together in the mud. In the frigid months they were usually caught with fork-like spears, the eels pinned between the tines. The fish proved essential to the endurance of the Pilgrims, and it is fitting that a river near Plymouth Colony was named Eel River.

The peculiar life cycle of the freshwater eel was almost tailor-made for the harvest season, and for stockpiling food for the winter. Eels are born in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, hatched as little larvae shaped like willow leaves. From there, they drift and swim toward the coast, where they enter the mouths of freshwater rivers and streams in the spring. I have observed them in that season when plates of ice still line the banks of tidal streams, “like pieces of slender glass rods shorter than a man’s finger,” as Rachel Carson described them.

The inches-long transparent juvenile fish then make their way upstream to feed and grow. They stay for 10 to 30 years, until one autumn when they feel the urge to return to the Sargasso Sea, the warm clockwise gyre more than 1,000 miles east of Bermuda in the Atlantic Ocean, to spawn and die.

In the 17th century, the autumn runs to the saltwater would have been epic, overlapping the hurricane season when an abundance of rainwater swelled the rivers. They moved in great numbers at night, en masse, sometimes forming braids with their bodies to overcome obstacles, or large balls to roll over gravel bars that separate the mouths of rivers from the sea. On wet nights eels would even travel overland, relentless in their quest to return to their natal womb in the deep ocean.

Traditionally, Native Americans caught eels in autumn by building large river weirs, two large stone walls stretching from the banks to the center of the river, forming a large V with the trap at the vortex on the downstream side. If the conditions were right — a steady rain to raise the river level and no moon — they could catch several tons of eel in one night. The fish was then dried and smoked for the winter, manna of huge and reliable proportions. There is evidence that East Coast Indians were using these stone and wood weirs 5,000 years ago, and probably earlier.

But if eels were an essential food for Native Americans and early colonists, then why are they neglected as a food fish in modern America? Why isn’t eel, instead of turkey, the symbol of colonial resilience and gratitude?

Eels are not easy to like. Their sliminess, as well as their general tendency to stir human uneasiness, has made them a tough species to champion. Eels are conspicuously absent from news reports about our beleaguered wild fisheries (whose demise has been brought ever closer by the calamitous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico). We hear instead about the magnificent emblems of our seas: the bluefin tuna, the swordfish, the Atlantic salmon, the cod.

But the eel is also disappearing, thanks largely to a multibillion dollar market driven by Japan’s appetite for the fish. Juveniles caught in river mouths are shipped to farms in China, where they are raised to edible size and then flown to sushi restaurants around the world — giving eels one of the least sustainable routes to market of any fish, wild or farmed. What’s more, global warming, dams and pollution have taken a heavy toll on eel populations in North America and Europe.

What can we do to restore this creature that once made up 25 percent of the fish biomass of Eastern rivers? For starters, we can rehabilitate the local wetlands that nurture eels at all life stages, because eels historically fed not only humans, but nearly everything in the system, from striped bass to cormorants.

We also need to deal with dams that prevent the free exchange of life from the sea to inland waterways. If dams cannot be removed, then they should be equipped with eel ladders to help juvenile eels travel upstream. And hydrodam operators should consider turning off the turbines, which wound or kill eels, for a few hours on autumn nights during the peak of vast unseen migrations of the adult fish to the sea.

Let’s be thankful, then, for the beautiful but forgotten Thanksgiving eel. And let’s accept responsibility for preserving the fish that did so much to sustain the newcomers to these shores so many years ago.

James Prosek is the author, most recently, of “Eels: An Exploration, From New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World’s Most Mysterious Fish.”

Stradee, beautiful pic..... Love it and the colors.......... I was once - as a very young person - asked what was my favorite color......... I answered, "All of them."

You were very smart to not try the sale thingy......... I never have done that and at my age probably never will....... Besides, on the internet there are the same/or better sales and it's delivered to your door......... How about them cookies??????

Thanks for the clicks ----- My trees said so...........

sumac, great articles. Really interesting stuff. Thanks.
I love sweet potatoes........ And, the Native American Squanto spoke English much better than the P. Rock people who stopped at that point because the men had run out of beer............ True story - it's in the boats books..........

Ecology:

Frequency Matters

Sacha Vignieri


CREDIT: DR. ANGELIKA MESCHEDE
Aggressive conflict is dangerous. Thus many animals have evolved signals to advertise their ability to defend resources, such as antlers in elk or bird song. For many aquatic species, however, signaling one's prowess is not so straightforward. Murky environments hinder the ability of receivers to discern visual cues, making proactive signaling more difficult. Amazonian knifefish use an electric sense to navigate and forage in muddy tropical waters. Individuals produce distinct electric signals, which have been implicated in courtship and aggressive displays. Through a series of experiments conducted within a natural population of Amazonian knifefish (Sternarchorynchus sp.) in Peru, Fugère et al. demonstrate that larger males produce higher-frequency signals and that fish that emit higher-frequency signals outcompete those with lower frequencies in direct competition. Furthermore, fish only respond aggressively towards an artificial electric signal played at a frequency lower than their own. Thus, the frequency of an animal's electric discharge accurately signals its resource-holding potential, and competitors heed the electrical warning.
Biol. Lett. 10.1098/rsbl.2010.0804 (2010).

Sociology:

Political Leapfrogging

Barbara R. Jasny


CREDIT: THINKSTOCKPHOTOS.COM
Although there have been many discussions of the polarized nature of American politics, do the views of elected officials match the preferences of their electorate? Bafumi and Herron sought to answer this question by comparing a national opinion survey of American voters (the Cooperative Congressional Election Study; CCES) with legislator voting records of the 109th (2005–2006) and 110th (2007–2008) Congresses. In many cases, the CCES questions were similar to (or the same as) actual congressional roll call votes, which allowed for better comparison. By developing a linear scale bounded by representatives (or CCES respondents) who had taken consistently liberal or conservative positions, the authors found that members of Congress were more extreme than the voters they represented. The median member of the 109th House of Representatives was more conservative than the median American voter, but the median member of the 110th House of Representatives was more liberal. Thus, voting out one extremist usually led to replacement by someone equally extreme, but of the opposite party. The authors refer to this as "leapfrogging" because the moderate views of the median American voter are leapfrogged during the turnover. Although the turnover was similar in the Senate, overall it appeared to be more moderate.
Amer. Polit. Sci. Rev. 104, 519 (2010).

November 25, 2010

Front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rise in Sea

By LESLIE KAUFMAN
NORFOLK, Va. — In this section of the Larchmont neighborhood, built in a sharp “u” around a bay off the Lafayette River, residents pay close attention to the lunar calendar, much as other suburbanites might attend to the daily flow of commuter traffic.

If the moon is going to be full the night before Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks it on a parallel block, away from the river. The next morning, she walks through a neighbor’s backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep puddle that routinely accumulates on her street after high tides.

For Ms. Peck and her neighbors, it is the only way to live with the encroaching sea.

As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is increasingly disrupting life here and all along the East Coast, a development many climate scientists link to global warming.

But Norfolk is worse off. Situated just west of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, it is bordered on three sides by water, including several rivers, like the Lafayette, that are actually long tidal streams that feed into the bay and eventually the ocean.

Like many other cities, Norfolk was built on filled-in marsh. Now that fill is settling and compacting. In addition, the city is in an area where significant natural sinking of land is occurring. The result is that Norfolk has experienced the highest relative increase in sea level on the East Coast — 14.5 inches since 1930, according to readings by the Sewells Point naval station here.

Climate change is a subject of friction in Virginia. The state’s attorney general, Ken T. Cuccinelli II, is trying to prove that a prominent climate scientist engaged in fraud when he was a researcher at the University of Virginia. But the residents of coastal neighborhoods here are less interested in the debate than in the real-time consequences of a rise in sea level.

When Ms. Peck, now 75 and a caretaker to her husband, moved here 40 years ago, tidal flooding was an occasional hazard.

“Last month,” she said recently, “there were eight or nine days the tide was so doggone high it was difficult to drive.”

Larchmont residents have relentlessly lobbied the city to address the problem, and last summer it broke ground on a project to raise the street around the “u” by 18 inches and to readjust the angle of the storm drains so that when the river rises, the water does not back up into the street. The city will also turn a park at the edge of the river back into wetlands — it is now too saline for lawn grass to grow anyway. The cost for the work on this one short stretch is $1.25 million.

The expensive reclamation project is popular in Larchmont, but it is already drawing critics who argue that cities just cannot handle flooding in such a one-off fashion. To William Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch, a local conservation group, the project is well meaning but absurd. Mr. Stiles points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has already spent $144,000 in recent years to raise each of six houses on the block.

At this pace of spending, he argues, there is no way taxpayers will recoup their investment.

“If sea level is a constant, your coastal infrastructure is your most valuable real estate, and it makes sense to invest in it,” Mr. Stiles said, “but with sea level rising, it becomes a money pit.”

Many Norfolk residents hope their problems will serve as a warning.

“We are the front lines of climate change,” said Jim Schultz, a science and technology writer who lives on Richmond Crescent near Ms. Peck. “No one who has a house here is a skeptic.”

Politics aside, the city of Norfolk is tackling the sea-rise problem head on. In August, the Public Works Department briefed the City Council on the seriousness of the situation, and Mayor Paul D. Fraim has acknowledged that if the sea continues rising, the city might actually have to create “retreat” zones.

Kristen Lentz, the acting director of public works, prefers to think of these contingency plans as new zoning opportunities.

“If we plan land use in a way that understands certain areas are prone to flooding,” Ms. Lentz said, “we can put parks in those areas. It would make the areas adjacent to the coast available to more people. It could be a win-win for the environment and community at large and makes smart use of our coastline.”

Ms. Lentz believes that if Norfolk can manage the flooding well, it will have a first-mover advantage and be able to market its expertise to other communities as they face similar problems.

But she also acknowledges that for the businesses and homes entrenched on the coast, such a step could be costly, and that the city has no money yet to pay them to move.

In the short run, the city’s goal is just to pick its flood-mitigation projects more strategically. “We need to look broadly and not just act piecemeal,” Ms. Lentz said, referring to Larchmont.

To this end, Norfolk has hired the Dutch firm Fugro to evaluate options like inflatable dams and storm-surge floodgates at the entrances to waterways.

But to judge by the strong preference in Larchmont for action at any cost, it may not be easy for the city to choose which neighborhoods might be passed over for projects.

Neighborhood residents lobbied hard for the 18-inch lifting of their roadway, even though they know it will offer not much protection from storms, which are also becoming more frequent and fearsome. Many say that housing values in the neighborhood have plummeted and that this is the only way to stabilize them.

Others like Mr. Schultz support the construction, even though they think the results will be very temporary indeed.

“The fact is that there is not enough engineering to go around to mitigate the rising sea,” he said. “For us, it is the bitter reality of trying to live in a world that is getting warmer and wetter.”

Sweet Taters!!! Luved the article!

You'd believe that with all the technology available, there'd be no starvation or lacking of vitamins on the planet.

Recall seeing a few eels when scuba diving...they live in rock caves. So ya never offer the lil critters food...meaning keep hands out of openings ya can't see inside of. Shy by nature, ya don't wanna get bit by one by invading their space. owie

Isn't that amazing? To see stuff on tv, you'd think the pilgrims landed with stores of grains, veggies, meat, and other goodies to keep them from starving during the winter.

Fall colors are magnificent, arn't they?

My new vacuum works well, and there's no way i was going out there today no matter how much money i would have saved...and looking on line, i didn't lose a penny on the sale. yipppeee

Today i'm home, warm, and munchin' leftovers. yum

Kittens happy too.

Did my 10-12 clicking. And eating leftovers too. Yummy.

November 27, 2010

To Fight Climate Change, Clear the Air

By VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN and DAVID G. VICTOR
AS the curtain rises tomorrow in Cancún, Mexico, on the next round of international talks on climate change, expectations are low that the delegates will agree on a new treaty to reduce emissions that contribute to global warming. They were unable to do so last year in Copenhagen, and since then the negotiating positions of the biggest countries have grown even further apart.

Yet it is still possible to make significant progress. To give these talks their best chance for success, the delegates in Cancún should move beyond their focus on long-term efforts to stop warming and take a few immediate, practical actions that could have a tangible effect on the climate in the coming decades.

The opportunity to make progress arises from the fact that global warming is caused by two separate types of pollution. One is the long-term buildup of carbon dioxide, which can remain in the atmosphere for centuries. Diplomacy has understandably focused on this problem because, without deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, there can be no permanent solution to warming.

The carbon dioxide problem is hard to fix, however, because it comes mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, which is so essential to modern life and commerce. It will take decades and trillions of dollars to convert all the world’s fossil-fuel-based energy systems to cleaner systems like nuclear, solar and wind power. In the meantime, a fast-action plan is needed.

But carbon dioxide is not the only kind of pollution that contributes to global warming. Other potent warming agents include three short-lived gases — methane, some hydrofluorocarbons and lower atmospheric ozone — and dark soot particles. The warming effect of these pollutants, which stay in the atmosphere for several days to about a decade, is already about 80 percent of the amount that carbon dioxide causes. The world could easily and quickly reduce these pollutants; the technology and regulatory systems needed to do so are already in place.

Take methane, for example, which is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in causing warming. It is emitted by coal mines, landfills, rice paddies and livestock. And because it is the main ingredient in natural gas, it leaks from many older natural-gas p

There is more to the article on op-ed pages of today's NYT, I just couldn't get it.

November 27, 2010

On Global Warming, Start Small

By BRUCE USHER
THE conference on climate change that begins tomorrow in Cancún, Mexico, will be the 13th such annual meeting since 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol, the first and only international agreement to place a cap on emissions of greenhouse gases, was written. This year there will be no such treaty. Why not? Excuses will abound, but finger-pointing misses the crux of the matter, which is that climate change is the most complicated and challenging problem mankind has ever faced.

Climate change is global, as emissions from one country enter the atmosphere and affect every other country. It is created by every form of economic activity, but its effects will not become critical for another generation. Today, it is practically impossible for more than 190 countries to negotiate — and ultimately ratify — an agreement that would affect all facets of their economies in order to deal with a problem so far in the future.

But there is an alternative to this top-down approach to climate change: a bottom-up strategy that stands a much better chance of working. Rather than count on international negotiations to produce an effective strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the United States should build upon the innovative clean-energy developments already under way in individual states. (Disclosure: I invest in clean energy in America and abroad.)

Texas alone produces more electricity through wind power than all but five countries. In California and Arizona, solar energy will soon provide electricity for three million homes. Geothermal energy plants are being built in Nevada. Michigan is making electric cars. And these are only the leaders. Iowa, Oregon and Illinois are also building wind power generators; New Jersey and Florida are investing in solar, and Maine in biomass.

These state-level efforts are already having national impact. Last year, renewable energy accounted for more than half of all the new power generation plants nationwide. Another 40 percent was from

More at the NYT today op-ed pages.

Did my multiple clicking and it may be that we finally had a killing freeze. My annuals were still good as if yesterday but they may have to be pulled now.

Thanks for the news, sumac....... Good stuff to ponder.

We've had freezing mornings for the past two days......... Soon to be going back up to normal though. Still can't believe the changes in the weather.

From today's NYT, an editorial:


November 28, 2010

Wolf Politics

These days, the gray wolf is in trouble in the Rocky Mountain West and in Washington, D.C. Several members of the House have introduced a bill that would permanently remove wolves from the protection of the Endangered Species Act. A more “moderate” proposal sponsored by two Montana Democrats, Senators Max Baucus and Jon Tester, would exempt only wolves in Montana and Idaho. Both bills could be pushed hard in the remaining days of Congress’s lame-duck session.

Either would set a terrible precedent, opening the door for special-interest groups to push other inconvenient species off the list. The bills would undercut one of the primary reasons for the act, which was to relieve Congress of the impossible task of legislating protections species by species and leave the final determination to scientists and wildlife management professionals.

Meanwhile, Gov. C. L. Otter of Idaho — furious at a court decision canceling his state’s wolf hunt — has said he won’t allow a dime of state money to be spent safeguarding Idaho’s wolves. He announced that Idaho won’t do biological surveys, won’t investigate illegal kills and won’t go after poachers.

What accounts for these outbursts, besides the usual political pandering to hunters? The main reason is an August decision by a District Court judge in Montana that restored wolves in Idaho and Montana to the list. The Interior department had earlier agreed (wrongly in our view) to lift protections in those states and let them manage wolf populations on their own.

Federal protections remained in place in Wyoming because the state’s management plan did not pass Interior’s muster. This led Judge Donald Molloy to rule that protections for what is a single species living in an interconnected region cannot be different in each state. Absent an approved plan in Wyoming, he ruled, protections would have to be restored in Montana and Idaho, which meant that Idaho could not have its hunt.

What’s needed is a stronger, long-term federal management plan that provides for a sustainable number of wolves across their entire range. If the states can guarantee that number, then let them manage their wolves. If they can’t, then federal protections must remain.

Clicking done, we also had two nights of freezing temps, but the annuals still stand. Must not have been freezing long enough. This weekend for sure.

NOVEMBER 27, 2010, 1:52 PM

U.S. Presses Iceland Over Whale Meat Trade

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Andrew C. Revkin Tourists watch a fin whale in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. The species is being heavily hunted in waters off Iceland.
The Obama administration has strongly criticized Iceland for resuming international trade in the meat from its expanding hunt for fin whales, the second largest whale species and one still listed as endangered under the United States Endangered Species Act. Here’s a summary and statement issued this week by the Department of Commerce:

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke issued the following statement on Iceland’s decision to resume international trade in fin whale meat, and its escalation of commercial whaling outside of the control of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Iceland killed 273 endangered fin whales in the last two years. IWC scientists fear removing more than 46 fin whales per year from the population is unsustainable. There is currently a global moratorium on commercial whaling, and a ban on international trade in fin whale meat.

“The United States strongly opposes Iceland’s defiance of the commercial whaling ban. We urge Iceland to cease international trade of whale meat and work with the international community to safeguard whale species,” said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. “It is troubling that Iceland continues to pursue commercial whaling outside the boundaries of the IWC, without member oversight or analysis by the Commission’s scientific committee.”

This video, shot by Greenpeace last year, shows the fin whale harvest:

.
There’s more on Iceland’s expanded commercial whaling efforts in earlier Dot Earth posts.

Mountain lions straying into more urban areas

Liza Gross

Sunday, November 28, 2010

When a mountain lion surfaced in North Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto in late August, it caught everyone but lion experts by surprise. Berkeley police, seeing no alternative, quickly shot and killed the wayward cat, a sexually immature male.

Mountain lion sightings are still rare - escaping notice is this stalking predator's stock in trade - but we're making it harder for them to avoid us. California has some of the best lion habitat in the nation, but it's rapidly giving way to rampant urbanization. Between 1984 and 2006, urban sprawl claimed nearly 970,000 acres, and now more than 5 million houses border the last wild places.

"Anyplace cougars exist, animals wander past that urban-rural fringe," says wildlife biologist Rick Hopkins, who led a 12-year study of mountain lions in the Diablo Mountains near San Jose. "We're putting all our effort and energy into figuring out how cougars affect us. But we're the ones having the greater adverse effect."

The cat's fearsome reputation, says the veteran lion biologist, has more to do with the fact that it's a large predator than with the actual risk of attack - 1,000 times less likely than a lightning strike. When lions are shot, it's almost never because they've threatened someone, Hopkins says, but because the first responders are police, not wildlife experts.

Though some states capture and relocate lions to remote sites, that's not feasible in densely populated California, says Marc Kenyon, the Department of Fish and Game's statewide lion coordinator. The agency would rather shoo cats back to their nearest habitat, but even that's not always possible with just three biologists overseeing nine Bay Area counties. And now that voters have rejected Proposition 21, which would have raised funds for the financially strapped agency, it's even more likely that police will have to handle the next lost lion on their own - without proper training.

Zara McDonald, executive director of the Felidae Conservation Fund in Sausalito, notes that police are "forced to make decisions really quickly based on no knowledge of mountain lions, their ecology or how they live and move."

Lion advocates have increased public education efforts to reduce human conflicts with the Bay Area's largest carnivore - with some success. When a mountain lion and two cubs surfaced around Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory last month, lab officials called wildlife biologist Jim Hale, who quickly signed on to run interference between the lab, local police and Fish and Game. Hale convinced worried residents that it's a "live and let live situation" in which lions are just doing what comes naturally - in less space.

Males can travel nearly 200 miles in search of new territory. The one who ventured into Gourmet Ghetto displayed "classic lion dispersal behavior," says Chris Wilmers, a UC Santa Cruz large-predator expert and lead researcher on the Bay Area Puma Project.

Wilmers, who tracks lions in the Santa Cruz Mountains, has seen animals hit dead-ends, then return to the open space they came from. "If that animal had not been seen," he says, "chances are it would have ended up back above the Berkeley hills."

Most cougars, in fact, navigate human landscapes without incident. Brian Kertson tracks lions navigating the rapidly urbanizing landscape east of Washington's Puget Sound.

Nearly all of his 32 collared lions proved remarkably adept at escaping detection. Cats traveled within 550 yards of residential developments thousands of times but rarely betrayed their presence.

McDonald, whose group helped start the Puma Project, says the same thing happens here: "A lot of our studies show that cats are living and sleeping very close to our trails, and humans never see them."

But that could change as unchecked sprawl carves up ever more habitat, isolating populations, reducing genetic diversity and placing animals at risk - which, for a lion, means run-ins with humans. No one tracks vehicle casualties statewide, but Wilmers found three dead lions on Highway 17 in the past year. An Amtrak train killed a lion trying to cross the tracks near Port Costa last month. And poaching, Hale suspects, "is more significant than we know."

About 4,000 to 6,000 lions inhabit the state. And with no measures to slow growth on the horizon, any hope of keeping lions in the Bay Area - where they're at a "critical threshold," Hale says - depends on conservation corridors. Relief may come with the Bay Area Critical Linkages Project, which is working to identify essential habitat and corridors from Santa Cruz to Sonoma to help expand conservation efforts. Whether conservation can compete with urbanization, however, remains an open question.

With the goal of understanding how habitat fragmentation affects everything from lion physiology to behavior, the Puma Project might expand to the East Bay next year.

"If we lose these cats on the landscape," McDonald says, "we're losing our last great keystone species in the Bay Area. We've already lost the wolves and the bear. This is the last one that can maintain a balanced ecosystem."

Liza Gross is a science writer and editor in Kensington. Contact The Chronicle at SFGate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/28/INF91GAE32.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle

November 29, 2010

The Mystery of the Red Bees of Red Hook

By SUSAN DOMINUS
Cerise Mayo expected better of her bees. She had raised them right, given them all the best opportunities — acres of urban farmland strewn with fruits and vegetables, a bounty of natural nectar and pollen. Blinded by devotion, she assumed they shared her values: a fidelity to the land, to food sources free of high-fructose corn syrup and artificial food coloring.

And then this. Her bees, the ones she had been raising in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and on Governors Island since May, started coming home to their hives looking suspicious. Of course, it was the foragers — the adventurers, the wild waggle dancers, the social networkers incessantly buzzing about their business — who were showing up with mysterious stripes of color. Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.

“I thought maybe it was coming from some kind of weird tree, maybe a sumac,” said Ms. Mayo, who tends seven hives for Added Value, an education nonprofit in Red Hook. “We were at a loss.”

An acquaintance, only joking, suggested the unthinkable: Maybe the bees were hitting the juice — maraschino cherry juice, that sweet, sticky stuff sloshing around vats at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company over on Dikeman Street in Red Hook.

“I didn’t want to believe it,” said Ms. Mayo, a soft-spoken young woman who has long been active in the slow-food movement. She found it particularly hard to believe that the bees would travel all the way from Governors Island to gorge themselves on junk food. “Why would they go to the cherry factory,” she said, “when there’s a lot for them to forage right there on the farm?”

It seems natural, by now, for humans to prefer the unnatural, as if we ourselves had been genetically modified to choose artificially flavored strawberry candy over strawberries, or crunchy orange “cheese” puffs over a piece of actual cheese. But when bees make the same choice, it feels like a betrayal to our sense of how nature should work. Shouldn’t they know better? Or, perhaps, not know enough to know better?

A fellow beekeeper sent samples of the red substance that the bees were producing to an apiculturalist who works for New York State, and that expert, acting as a kind of forensic foodie, found the samples riddled with Red Dye No. 40, the same dye used in the maraschino cherry juice.

No one knows for sure where the bees might have consumed the dye, but neighbors of the Dell’s factory, Ms. Mayo said, reported that bees in unusually high numbers were gathering nearby.

And she learned that Arthur Mondella, the owner of the factory, had hired Andrew Coté, the leader of the New York City Beekeepers Association, to help find a solution.

Mr. Mondella did not return phone calls seeking comment, but in an interview, Mr. Coté said that the bees were as great a nuisance to the factory as Red Dye No. 40 was to the beekeepers. (No, Ms. Mayo was not alone: David Selig, another Red Hook beekeeper, also had bees showing red.)

“Bees will forage from any sweet liquid in their flight path for up to three miles,” Mr. Coté said. While he has not yet visited the factory, he said that the bees might be drinking from its runoff, and that solving the problem “could be as easy as putting up some screens, or providing a closer source of sweet nectar.”

Could the tastiest nectar, even close by the hives, compete with the charms of a liquid so abundant, so vibrant and so cloyingly sweet? Perhaps the conundrum raises another disturbing question: If the bees cannot resist those three qualities, what hope do the rest of us have?

A story of the perils of urban farming, this is also a story of the careful two-step of gentrification. Red Hook embodies so much of Brooklyn culture — an infatuation with the borough’s old ways, just so long as those do not actually impinge on the modish design and values.

The maraschino cherries that emerge from the Dell’s factory have probably graced thousands of retro-chic cocktails and sundaes in Red Hook itself, or at least in Williamsburg. Finding some solution to the maraschino juice bee crisis — to all urban clashes of culture — is part of the project of New York, a wildly creative endeavor in and of itself.

All summer long, friends of Ms. Mayo were forever pointing out the funny coincidence that her first name means “cherry” in French; as a slow-food advocate with the last name Mayo, she was already accustomed to such observations.

Mr. Selig, who owns the restaurant chain Rice and raises the bees as a hobby, was disappointed that an entire season that should have been devoted to honey yielded instead a red concoction that tasted metallic and then overly sweet.

He and Ms. Mayo also fear that the bees’ feasting on the stuff could have unforeseeable health effects on the hives.

But Mr. Selig said there was something extraordinary, too, about those corn-syrup-happy bees that came flying back this summer.

“When the sun is a bit down, they glow red in the evenings,” he said. “They were slightly fluorescent. And it was beautiful.”

E-mail: [email protected]

My goodness, sumac --- wolves, whales, puma's --- and, around Red Hook people should BEE very careful. Probably the greatest problem with each article is we humans are taking up way too much room on the planet.

thanks.