Bee Radioactive

     There was a time that I loved bees, and I still do except that now I'm quite allergic to their stings (pretty much any bug that bites me sends me swelling up more than most).  No biggie, I told my doctor, which was when he pointed to my throat.  You get stung there, he said, and your airway will close.  He wrote out a prescription for an Epipen, the most popular and also the most expensive epinephrine shot (I went for the generic version, of which there are many).  None of that has stopped me, even as I hang up my hummingbird feeders each spring and watch them fill with both bees and wasps (which often dine on spiders).  But when I'm ready to refill those feeders, the dozen or so bees or wasps steadily move away as if aware that I'll be back with "fresh" food, even if I have to shake the feeder against the rail to shake off the one or two wasps still feeding.  They buzz silently and float around as if dandelion puffs scattering about.  And in all the years I've done that, I've been stung on the hand just once (unlike honeybees whose sting will cost them their lives, wasps can sting repeatedly).  Ages ago when I was just a young lad in love, I unknowingly crossed a nest of bees on a path and despite my youthful athletic prowess, found them chasing me en masse for about a hundred yards, which is a long ways when you are used to just a mere wave of your hand to cause them to go away.  

      Truth be told, I feel bad for the bees, what with all the varroa virus and neocortinids wiping out colony after colony.  Said a report from Penn State: About one-third of the food eaten by Americans comes from crops pollinated by honey bees, yet the insect is dying off at alarming rates.  In one year alone, between April of 2019 and April of 2020, one study reported a 43% colony loss in honey bees across the United States.  We needed them, not only for their honey (although really, when was the last time you bought and used honey) but for their pollinating abilities, something most farmers know as they contract those white boxes to dot their orchards ("renting" such colonies used to cost about $50 per box but has now soared to nearly 4x that price).  But all of that was before I read the piece in The New Yorker: Is Beekeeping Wrong?   Managed bees are typically kept in a drafty box low to the ground, as opposed to a snug nest high in a hollow tree.  Most beekeepers’ colonies are much larger than those which occur in the wild, and rival colonies might be separated by only a few yards, rather than by half a mile.  Much of the bees’ honey, which is supposed to get them through the winter, is taken before they have a chance to eat it.  A queen bee goes on a spree of mating flights early in her life, and then lays the fertilized eggs until her death.  In apiaries, queens often have their wings clipped, to interrupt swarming (a colony’s natural form of reproduction), and are routinely inspected, and replaced by newcomers, sometimes imported from the other side of the world.  Propolis —a wonderful, sticky substance that bees make from tree resin and that has antibacterial qualities— is typically scraped out of hives by beekeepers because it is annoying and hard to get off their hands.  These are all dire interventions in the fabric of the colony.  No wonder the bees keep dying.  In a normal year, perhaps ten or fifteen per cent of bee colonies die in the winter.  Last winter, America’s bees suffered colony losses of close to forty per cent, with varroa, “queen issues,” and starvation among the leading causes.  High death rates tend to lead to more bee imports, more bee medication, more bee supplements, more bee-breeding programs, and the whole unwieldy cycle continues (Smithsonian showed the beekeeping methods used thousands of years ago by the Mayans).

     If you've ever had a "wild" colony arrive on your doorstep, it is a sight to behold.  Seeking new territory, a queen will land high in a tree and before long, you will hear the steady hum of more and more bees following this new nesting sight.  First a volleyball-size swarm forms, then it beomes basketball-size, then it grows into a size which appears worrisome.  The one in our backyard was well over 2 feet long and nearly as wide, and all of this happened in about 30 minutes (this swarm size varies wildly from the Arctic bee --wait, bees in the Arctic??-- about which Discover wrote: In contrast to the large nests of honeybees, the Arctic bumblebee colonies only had about 20 or less individuals).  You can't predict or attract such a colony; but when it appears it is quick and often quite loud (especially to those walking nearby on the sidewalk).  A quick post locally online and 5 beekeepers responded that they were anxious to come out, some willing to offer money if they could be "first."  They wanted the colony, a free source of income for them (we said yes to someone who would be there in 20 minutes, and charged him nothing).  With next to no protective equipment, and only a large capture box, the beekeeper found the queen and put her in the box, and lIke clockwork, the entire hive followed her in.  What few bees remained, about 20 or so, were likely doomed, or now forced to find a new hive, he told us.  We had never entertained the thought of calling a pest company...wild colonies need all the help they can get.  Continued the article: ...natural beekeepers liken much conventional beekeeping to industrial agriculture — permeated by chemicals and the delusion of human control.  They dwell on the differences between the lives of wild, or free-living, bees...“I don’t think anybody contests that free-living bees have a better, easier life,” Seeley [Thomas Seeley, a biology professor at Cornell], told me.  “What is contested is whether that’s realistic.”  Seeley acknowledged that there will always be commercial bee operations, for honey production and for crop pollination.  But these constitute the minority: around ninety per cent of American beekeepers are hobbyists, with twenty-five colonies or fewer.  Seeley compared intensively managed bee colonies to racehorses.  “They live a short, hard life,” he said.  “My whole aim has been to present that there is an alternative.  In the United States, beekeepers are taught only what we might call the industrial form of beekeeping.  And that’s where I would say, ‘No...there is a choice here between how you want to relate to an organism whose life, in a way, you have under your control.’ ”

     It's an odd term that, "under your control."  As humans we feel that we can indeed label ourselves the top predator, judge and jury for so many organisms, and more than not, other humans.  From weeds to pests,  we decide what we want to grow, or what we want to die.  Wasp traps, spider sprays, Round-Up.  Take just this small take on moths from biologist Thor Hanson's interview in The Sun: There are a lot of creatures out there, particularly the arthropods --this with exoskeletons-- that we aren't very fond of.  Nonetheless they are totally essential.  They form the basis of food webs everywhere and are one of the major links between plants, which fix energy from the sun, and the rest of nature.  Maybe you don't like moths and flies when they get in your house, but without them you won't have any birds.  A mated pair of chickadees, for example, will capture between six and nine thousand moth caterpillars to feed to their nestlings.  And that's within an area the size of the average backyard.  Your yard needs to be full of insects if you're going to have the rest of the food web.

     My wife and I don't like to "kill" anything.  Flies that land inside our kitchen screens we trap in a glass and let outside.  Same with spiders (not sure what we'd do if we lived in scorpion or rattlesnake country).  But then came the rats, often pushed out of their "homes" as developments continued around us.  Rats are more human than you think – and they certainly like being around us, wrote The Conversation.  And as we refilled our bird feeders (we have a lot of birds), we noticed that rat "trails" were more and more evident in our lawn, the grasses pressed down as if manicured transit lanes had been created.  One early morning jogger stopped by and mentioned to my wife that it was "scary" running by our house in the morning (wait, what??)...because of the rats!  So back up a bit.  We had a few rat holes, I had to admit, just as we often saw black patches of ants on our sidewalks every now and then, most of which would disappear within a day.  But not the rat holes.  More and more of them appeared, then we noticed our dog would perk up as we let him our in the backyard and before long, WE began hearing the scampering of leaves.  The rat population was getting out of hand.  It was time for the bomb*...

     So what first comes to mind when you hear the word Pluto?  Was it that once-named planet that dotted the edge of our solar system?  Or if you're older, perhaps it was that goofy pup that accompanied Mickey Mouse.  But few would think of plutonium, an odd element which was known but little understood even in the days of Oppenheimer.  Could it be harnessed and if so, how could you control it?  Here's how Scientific American put it: The plutonium used for weapons exists only because people made it.  In 1940 scientists used a particle accelerator at the University of California, Berkeley, to bombard an isotope of uranium (which has 92 protons per atom) with nuclei of deuterium (a proton and a neutron stuck together).  That created neptunium (93 protons per atom), which conveniently decayed into plutonium with its 94 protons per atom.  Thus, one of the most efficient ingredients for making a nuclear weapon was born.  It's easier and cheaper to make enough plutonium for a weapon than it is to produce enough enriched uranium, the only other element used to sustain a fission chain reaction in nuclear weapons (said the article, the bombs dropped on Japan in WWII were a combination of both).  What makes plutonium so unique, and so difficult to harness, is that: ...It's pliable and compliant in some conditions and delicately brittle in others.  When it's a liquid, melting around 650 degrees Celsius, it's the most viscous of all the elements, dripping languidly.  If you heat it in its solid form, sometimes it expands, and other times it contracts.  It's reactive with air, swiftly shifting its appearance from a silvery metal to a rainbow spectrum of tarnish.  When it solidifies, it expands, like water, and its length and density change without much provocation.  Its most famous trick, of course, is its propensity for radioactive decay, through which it transforms itself out of existence...This tendency is also what makes it so dangerous.  Inhaled plutonium decays in the body, releasing alpha particles (helium nuclei) that can wreak havoc.  The isotope plutonium 238, used as a heat and power source but not in weapons, exhibits other strange behaviors.  “If you spill it in the laboratory, it will move around on its own,” Martz says [Joseph Martz, a scientist at Los Alamos].  The oomph from a plutonium atom's decay sends it shooting across a surface.  “It can get everywhere,” he adds.  And now, plutonium may indeed go everywhere as we revive its role in bombs.

     Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen, who has written six previous books on military and intelligence programs—CIA, Pentagon, DARPA—all designed to prevent nuclear World War III, interviewed countless high security officials including several Secretaries of Defense, and came up with a rather frightening scenario in her book, Nuclear War: A Scenario.  In the book, North Korea launces a 1-megaton bomb which hits the Pentagon and the US counterattacks begin in a ping-pong way.  As she mentioned in an interview in Atomic Scientists about such a "madman" scenario: North Korea does not announce any of its missile tests, whereas the other countries do.  North Korea has launched 100 missiles since January 2022...it doesn’t take but one weapon to set off a chain reaction to unleash the current arsenal, which is forward deployed in launch-on-warning positions and could be fired in as little as a minute—15 minutes for the submarines.  There are enough weapons in those positions right now to bring on a nuclear winter that would kill an estimated 5 billion people.  She points out that US missiles headed to North Korea have to cross Russian airspace which would likely interpret those missiles as incoming to its own country and fire back, and on and on.  When asked about our defense systems intercepting such nuclear missiles, she answered simply: We can’t.  That is pure fantasy.  During the final fact-checking incantations, I had the book read by a lieutenant general who ran these scenarios for NORAD.  I was almost hoping someone would say, Annie, you should take this part out of the book, because we have a secret Iron Dome that you can’t report on.  No.  The truth is that the United States relies upon 44 interceptor missiles to stop any incoming missiles.  Russia alone has 1,674 nuclear warheads in “ready to launch” position.  Adding to that, according to congressional reports, the interceptors are only approximately 50 percent effective.

     The piece in Scientific American had a different take, implying that an unannounced enemy attack would likely be directed at one of the 480 US missiles silos scattered across the northern part of the Midwest, leftovers from early cold war days.  The implication is that even if only a few nuclear warheads got through and detonated in those silos, it would cause a much more reactive, and effective, destruction.  So who would think in this manner?  Apparently, the U.S. military among others.  Those aging Minuteman missiles currently housed in those silos, missiles which are still active, are being replaced and armed with ever more powerful missiles and warheads (or so says the magazine, even taking you into a few of the facilities).  Such thinking may have been fine with bullets and such, but the simple exchange of a few nuclear missiles would likely bear little need for excessive retaliation.  And that destruction would continue long after the bombing had stopped (the magazine showed a rather detailed projection of how radioactive clouds would spread across the entire U.S., based on historical wind patterns).  So why the worry?     

     Author Oliver Franklin-Wallis, in his book Wastelend,* wrote about the nuclear storage site on the coast in Cumbria, England (ironically, a majority of such sites are built near coastlines, facing not so much the threat of a missile strike but rising seas or tsunamis, such as what happened at Fukushima, Japan).  The site Stellafield (formerly known as Windscale) holds: ...around 90,000 metric tons of reprocessed uranium and 140 metric tons of civil plutonium, the largest stockpile in the world.  For context: as little as 8.8 pounds of plutonium is needed to build a nuclear weapon...When spent fuel is removed from a nuclear reactor, it is a hot mess.  The chain reaction leaves behind a hodgepodge of mass of decaying elements, which are still firing off neutrons and radioactive particles like sparks from a roman candle.  To recover the depleted uranium and plutonium inside, the fuel must be dissolved in nitric acid and put through a chemical separation process.  The radioactive by-products creatied in the heart of the reactor are left behind in the form of "highly active liquor."  This material --including americium, strontium, and other rare and highly emitting isotopes-- is classified as "high-level" nuclear waste.  A single canister can emit 2,000 sieverts of radiation per hour.  (Around 5 sieverts is enough to kill you).  

     And those "secure" storage sites for spent nuclear fuel?  Only one exists in the world, in Finland (built to hold Finland's nuclear waste).  Wrote Franklin-Wallis: The waste will be stored inside copper canisters, sealed inside grout and cement, and then placed inside an underground tunnel network up to 43 miles long that is being dug down deep into the granite bedrock.  There it will stay, in concrete tunnels up to 520m deep, for at least the next 100,000 years.  We are not built to think in such timescales.  Human beings --lucky ones-- might survive a few decades, empires a few centuries, religions a few millennia.  The oldest known cave art dates back 46,000 years or so, the oldest writing just 5,600.  A hundred thousand years ago the Earth was still in the grips of the last Ice Age, homo sapiens scraping for survival alongside Neanderthals and giant ground sloths.   But nuclear waste forces us to think in deep time: not in lifetimes, but in half-lives...Which forces questions, like: how do we build something to last longer than anything in human history?  And what do we tell our

B descendants about the danger we have left for them?  One should note that the Plutonium 239 used in reactors has a half-life of nearly 25,000 years (uranium-235, also used in reactors, has a half-life of 700 million years). 

     The plutonium being used to upgrade the warheads on those siloed missiles are not the main explosive force, but rather the force that triggers something even stronger as the plutonium atoms compress (fission), then: ...ignite fusion in the bomb's second stage, forcing deuterium (a proton and a neutron) and tritium (a proton and two neutrons) to merge, releasing helium, neutrons and much energy.  If this sounds way above your head (it was for me), the bottom line appears to be that these new bombs will be much more powerful than anything we've used before.  But here's the thing: plutonium does decay and as the article notes: As [the plutonium] pits change, their performance and safety in any conditions --including just sitting on a shelf-- become questionable...The National Nuclear Security Administration's own studies have suggested the pits will last at least 150 years but also that their degradation could result in surprise defects.  And scientists may never know exactly what those defects do or how they would affect an explosion...

     Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons reported that over 12,000 nuclear weapons are held by nine countries: Israel, North Korea, Russia, China, Pakistan, India, France, the UK, and the US (the US and Russia have nearly 90% of those); but the US has also positioned nuclear weapons in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey emphasizing that these 100 warheads are "non-strategic;" added ICAN: While these are often framed as “smaller” or “low yield” nuclear weapons,  and it’s implied that they would cause less damage, these warheads can have explosive yields up to 300 kilotons, or 20 times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.  The Oppenheimer saga is positioned as a race to beat Hitler's scientists who were thought to be close to creating an atomic bomb.  One can only imagine how that may have changed events in Europe during WWII, had that happened.  But how much more patience will Putin show before he decides that enough is enough with Ukraine?  And with the US already having approved 100 shipments of weapons to Israel, would Netanyahu be far behind (and yes, tensions continue to build between Pakistan and India as well).  Biden threatened to withhold some bomb shipments to Israel recently, unless Israel addressed the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but faced criticism from some of his biggest donors over such a decision.  Biden also faced pressure from big oil as their tax subsidies are set to expire next year -- yes, despite billions of dollars in profits, big oil and other fossil fuels companies continue to receive government subsidies, wrote Reuters and the IMF (Trump met with 20 of those big oil executives and allegedly asked them if they would pledge $1 billion for his campaign he would not cut those subsidies should he become President, wrote The Guardian).  And if Iran developed nuclear weapons?  Whether it's money, or power, or madness that controls the fates and lives of so many, we may never know; but it is a far cry from my school days of being told to duck under a desk if a nuclear bomb exploded (I still comprehend about as little about nuclear weapons as during those Cold War days, although a popular poster in my college days more accurately told you what to do in the event of a nuclear bomb attack: Dive Under A Desk and Kiss Your Ass Goodbye).

     Wallis-Franklin ended his chapter on nuclear waste with this: The writer and historian Rebecca Altman once coined the phrase "time-bombing the future."  She was writing about synthetic chemicals -- but really the concept was about harm, and the ways that we externalize it.  What are carbon emissions, if not time-bombing the future?  What is waste left stewing in hermetically sealed landfills or fizzing with radiation in the bowels of unmarked caves?  These are a form of waste colonialism inflicted not on our neighbors, but on our children, who will bear the risks long after we have reaped their benefits.  What will our descendants in future centuries think of these time-bombs -- in the case of nuclear waste, literally explosive materials we deposit in the geological strata?  One can only hope they will look back at our present technology the way archeologists look at prehistory, as artifacts of a more prehistoric time.

     Biologist Thor Hanson mentioned earlier noted that the forest data now tracking seedlings and new growth (as well as any old growth dying), would crash the average spread sheet.  When you're in the woods and look up at the trees, you are looking at the past.  The old trees represent environmental conditions decades ago, when they sprouted and grew to adulthood.  If you want to look at the future, look down at the seedlings and saplings in that environment...What the Forest Service data shows is that the centers of most trees' ranges are moving, because the places where they have the most success are changing.  One study found that tree species in eastern North American forests are moving at an average rate of fifteen kilometers northward every decade.  In some cases the trees are moving their ranges faster than birds are.  Along with forests moving came this from Atlas Obscura: the UK now has more giant sequoias and redwoods than does California, as in over 400,000 more.  Whether we destroy the bees or the people with what we've created, our fate may be a trajectory we soon can't stop.  Our planet and nature may be tiring of cleaning up what we've dumped and destroyed; but once we enter the world of nuclear destruction, it may prove too much to overcome, at least for one species...humans.

*The "bomb" in this case is a terrible mix of chemicals which, once lit, produce an asphyxiating gas of sulphur dioxide. Even with a tight face mask, one can feel the immediate irritation when the gas blows your1 way.  Meant for moles and gophers, these bombs last about a minute and are generally more effective than poisons or blood thinners, both of which produce slow, agonizing deaths, not only for the animal but for any other predator that may snatch one up as it escapes its hole.  It was a horrible task for me, but one which I did early in the morning while most, if not all, of the rats below would be asleep and one hopes, not suffer as long.  Given my druthers, I would vote --perhaps unrealistically-- for a world where enough hawks and coyotes could maintain a more natural "control" of the rat population.  One can only dream...

UPDATE: In the recent post on the ongoing war in Gaza by Israel, the former head of charity group Oxfam told The Conversation how humanitarian aid to the area is --or is not-- being delivered, and why (the photo of the backlog of aid trucks is alone worth a peek).  And a similarly interesting viewpoint in the same online magazine gave an opinion of why this particular issue has rallied so many protesters, asking why this particular war and not the many others happening around the world.  The writer, an associate professor at the Australian university, Griffith, presented the catalysts that can cause masses of people to coalesce for a cause, be it hunger or destruction or disease.  In her conclusion, she writes: Protest is not always about achieving specific demands, though.  Protests also have significant symbolic value in raising awareness and bringing others to the cause.  Whether student protesters are motivated by powerful stories, a need to protect victims or the chance to have an impact, they exemplify a wider narrative message that protesting for peace is a worthwhile pursuit.  And if you're tired of hearing the word "outside agitators" being reported on these protests, Code Switch hinted that the only such agitators from the outside may be from heavily funded media sources downplaying the underlying issue.  Just a thought...