"trees" news and stories

Supporters says a new Kentucky law requiring mining companies to include native flowering plants in their mountaintop reclamation programs should prop up honeybee populations across the state, helping to preserve Appalachia's distinctive culinary traditions.

"Most of our food depends on honeybee pollination," explains Eastern Kentucky University senior researcher Tammy Horn, who abandoned a career teaching English literature to fight for honeybees. "Currently, we're losing one out of every three colonies. It's a crisis."

Surface mining isn't responsible for the decimation of the honeybee population, Horn clarifies: Disease and the decline of beekeeping are just two among many factors contributing to the problem. "If we quit mining tomorrow, we'd still have a bee crisis," Horn says.

When it comes to Christmas trees, the big debate is usually "live" versus "artificial," with both sides having pros and cons. Live trees can be expensive and get needles everywhere, but they have a wonderful scent and a look of freshness. Artificial trees are easy to put up and are less expensive in the long run, but very few actually look realistic. This year, we can add a third category to that discussion: chocolate. La Maison du Chocolate has a chocolate Christmas Tree for sale. The base is made of dark chocolate pralines infused with mandarin orange and milk chocolate praline infused with winter spices. Decorating the exterior of the tree with a cubist bent are circular and square chocolates in dark, white and milk. It costs $138, but is only available in cities where there is a Maison du Chocolate boutique - New York, London and Paris - because it is too delicate to be shipped.

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Attention readers who live in the EU: you might want to look into adopting an olive tree. For £60, you can lay claim to one of the 881 trees in the Nudo organic olive grove in Italy and receive all of the produce from that tree. Think about that for a moment and realize that you'll be able to make salad dressings with and dip bread into olive oil from your own tree. You will receive three packages during the year from Nudo. The first will contain a certificate and an information booklet about your tree, the second (in spring) will have 1-3 liters of pressed extra virgin olive oil and the third (in fall) will contain lemon-flavored olive oil and three types of olive oil soaps. Unfortunately, they don't ship outside of the EU or I would be well on my way to adopting one of the 300 or so remaining trees.  

[via A Full Belly]

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Last week we heard about a man who stole 27,000 pounds of steak. But after uncovering some more food thievery, it seems that some people will steal just about anything that isn't nailed down. And that means that even roots aren't secure enough:

Thieves stole 150 plum trees from an orchard in Hungary. They were uprooted and removed from the site during the off-season. The trees were valued at approximately $9,500.

In Tennessee, a 53-foot trailer containing 2,880 cases of Red Bull was stolen by thieves who really must have taken to hear the message that "red bull gives you wings."

In a possibly related theft, a trailer containing $100,000 of Kraft sauces was stolen in the same city in Tennessee. The trailer was later recovered, but the sauce was gone. We'll have to wait and see whether anyone reports a truck of stolen chicken wings, which might explain the disappearance of the sauce.