Bees Needs - Mary Woltz
Francesca Rheannon talks with beekeeper Mary Woltz who keeps bees at the Quail
Hill Farm in Amagansett, New York and markets the honey they produce with the
label ‘Bees Needs”.
They talk about biodynamic beekeeping, the role of bees in what we eat, reasons for bee colony collapse and what we can do to help the survival of the bees.
Mary Woltz offered these links to information about the topics covered in today's program:
excerpt:
Biodynamic bee keeping is an approach which respects this integrity of the colony. Its aim is to minimise stress factors and allow bees to develop in accordance with their true nature. Bees are allowed to build natural comb, swarming is acknowledged as the only way to rejuvenate and reproduce a colony, the queen is allowed to move freely throughout the hive and sufficient honey is retained in the hive to provide for the winter. A system of bee keeping that respects a colony's natural integrity will not only reduce stress and encourage healthy bees, it will also be commercially viable. ............
John Halsey of Peconic Land Trust - Updated 2015
Are we running out of farmland?
In
a land where potatoes once covered the landscape, traditional farming on the
east end has given way to luxury housing over the last decades.
The
Peconic Land Trust was started in 1983 to ensure the protection of Long
Island’s working farms, natural lands, and heritage.
John
v. H. Halsey, President and founder of the Trust was brought up on a
traditional farm in Southampton Town.
Francesca Rheannon spoke with Halsey in 2013 about land preservation efforts of the Peconic
LandTrust, the demise of traditional farms, how community supported
agriculture was developed by the Land Trust and what can be done to keep protected land in farming.
Here is an update:
More information about the trust is at peconiclandtrust.org.
Here is an update:
Last summer (2014) the Southampton Town Board preserved its first two
farmland parcels with the proviso that the land, 33 acres in Water Mill, must
be in the hands of working food farmers.
The land was sold to a local farmer at considerably below market value
after purchase by the Town and transfer to the Peconic Land Trust.
Coastal Erosion
As
sea level rises, coastal erosion is a major problem on the East End.
Water front property owners have been battling with town
trustees over their attempt to protect their property by building bulkheads or
other hardened structures.
The structures usually result in significant loss of
sand in front of the structure and also down stream along the shoreline,
exposing neighbors’ beachfront
and
public beaches to severe erosion as well.
The authority of the trustees – based on a colonial era
English law — has been challenged in the
courts after disputes with homeowners.
In May 2012, a state judge ruled that the Southampton Town Trustees do not have the authority to regulate homeowners’
placement of structures on or under the ocean beach to protect their homes in
the event of severe erosion during major storms, at least within village
boundaries.
Again in February 2014, as reported in the Southampton Press, a New
York State Justice ruled against the Trustees, first ordering them to
turn over their books to the town — an order that was refused — and then declaring that their authority to regulate constructionactivity along the oceanfront did not extend into the incorporated villages, asthe Trustees have claimed.
And a group of homeowners along Southampton town’s oceanfront in Water Mill,
Bridgehampton and Sagaponack, combined to fund a multi-million dollar beach replenishment project in 2013 after severe loss of beach sand washed out dunesand threatened homes.
Marine
biologist Douglas Hardy has been studying the devastating effects of hardened
structures on Southold town’s coast line on the north fork of Long Island — effects like severe erosion and
reduced coastal resilience in the era of climate change.
Hardy
wrote a paper The Starvation of Southold Beaches for the Conservation Advisory Council to The Southold
Town Trustees.
Hardy identifies the
problem and considers the legal aspects of fixing it as property owners battle
with local government. He
notes in the paper that as sea level rises and storms become more extreme,
storm surges will overwhelm and undermine hardened structures — and those structures will also magnify storm surge
damage to adjacent beaches. He proposes ways to encourage homeowners to plan
for sea level rise in a way that better protects coastal resilience.
The
paper was submitted in January at a town board meeting, but was not
enthusiastically received, according to EastEndBeacon.com, a news blog.
Sustainable East End's Francesca Rheannon talked with Doug Hardy last week.
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