Why Are Our Bees Vanishing? (video)

(VanishingBees.com) Imagine half a million adults skipping town and leaving their children behind. Picture an opened suitcase filled with bundles of cash at a bus stop yet no robber wants to snatch it. The apiary science mystery known as "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD) displays these very symptoms. Not only do our critical crop pollinating honey bees abandon their hives, which they cannot live away from for more than 24 hours, but the queen and the brood as well. Unnatural. Unheard of. Even the predators that usually raid the hive for honey stay away when nothing is protecting it. At first it sounds like an urban legend or an exaggerated tale. Except it's not. The situation is both real and dire. Bees are disappearing all over the planet, and no one knew why. But now the answers are becoming apparent:

• systemic pesticides (not toxins sprayed on to dissipate but taken up into every part of the plant where they weaken bees' immune systems)
• mites and fungal blight brought on by weakened immunity, which would normally be segregated with wax in the sterile environment of the hive but is not because of the incapacitated bees
• cell phone tower radiation, which is disruptive to compromised bees
• mono-cropping (growing a single crop in need of pollination but no other plants on which the bees could survive between harvests)
• stresses in the environment (depleted soil, contaminated fields, genetically manipulated plants by companies like Monsanto)
• like AIDS and mystery flu syndromes and E. coli outbreaks, once the organism is compromised in terms of nutrients and immunity, it is open to opportunistic infections and influences

Vanishing of the Bees - Trailer from Bee The Change on Vimeo.

Buddhism fastest growing religion in Australia

A large Buddhist site is being built in Bendigo, near Melbourne (Map: lonelyplanet.com).

A Buddhist tradition
S. Muthiah (The Hindu)
The fastest growing religion in Australia is Buddhism, and its roots have been traced back to Sri Lanka. But the question is, Will it continue?

Growing interest
Buddhism is the fastest growing religion in Australia, and the biggest reliquary-burial mound (stupa) outside countries with significant Buddhist populations is being built in Bendigo, not far from Melbourne.

It was while doing 18 months of research on Buddhism in Australia for two articles on the subject that now appear in the Cambridge University Press' massive tome The Encyclopedia of Religions in Australia that [D.S. Abeygunawardena] not only came across these two nuggets but also discovered that Australia had 570 listed Buddhist organizations, including monasteries, temples, retreat [center]s, meditation centers, and meeting places for Buddhist societies.

A 3-D model of The Great Stupa, the biggest reliquary-burial mound outside countries with a significant Buddhist presence.

Today these are patronized by a Buddhist population of a little over 400,000 (two percent of the total population), almost double the 1996 census count ten years earlier. Islam has only about three-fourths that number and Hinduism a third. With nearly 13 million listing themselves as Christian, this tale of Buddhism in Australia is just one of Abey's typical, but solidly fact-based, footnotes.

It's a story that begins with a boatload of Chinese arriving in Adelaide in 1851 to walk to the Victorian goldfields. Many of them were Buddhists. But there is no record what happened to them or their faith. Better recorded is the 500 Sinhalese [Sri Lankan] Buddhists from the Galle area in southern Sri Lanka. They came to work as contract labor in the Queensland sugar plantations.

Given their urban background, they soon moved out of the plantations and found work in Broome, Darwin, and Thursday Island in the pearl industry. (Some of their descendants are still in the jewellery business). On tiny Thursday island, the 100 or so Sinhalese families that settled there built the first Buddhist shrine in Australia. But when their descendants moved out, the shrine vanished. More

Ajahn Brahm
Ajahn Brahmvamso's monastery is located at 216 Kingsbury Drive, Serpentine 6125, Serpentine, Western Australia (Map) - Ajahn who? - Books - Donate - Where - About - Contact