Honey Harvest - Sowers Apiary
Canby, Oregon
I
was all abuzz about my trip to Sowers Apiary. Bees are
so cool. Not only do they make honey –
a natural, unprocessed, and locally produced sweetener
– but they are also responsible for pollinating
most of our veggies, fruits, and flowers. Owner
Chuck
Sowers, who has been renting bees and harvesting honey
for almost 30 years, hooked me up with a bee suit and
let me take photos while he taught me about bees.
I
asked Chuck if he had been seeing the effects of Colony
Collapse Disorder (CCD). CCD is when a healthy hive
is suddenly abandoned by its bees and the bees then
die. Although such disappearances have been noted
throughout beekeeper history, a drastic rise in the
phenomenon was observed in North America in 2006, thus
earning the name. Chuck estimates that presently
20-25 percent of his hives are dying annually, where
20 years ago the figure was less than 5 percent.
CCD pressures beekeepers like Chuck to take even greater
care for their bees. It also alarms many environmentalists
who see it as another sign that our natural resources
are in jeopardy. No one has proven the cause of CCD,
but speculation includes pollution, pesticide use, genetically
modified plants, monoculture farming, and climate change.
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Portland Fruit Tree Project
All Over Portland, Oregon
Organizers of the Portland Fruit Tree Project understand the value of bees and the abundance of fruit they help provide in the Portland area. The nonprofit program organizes volunteers to collect fruit from the multitude of trees in area backyards and redistribute it to people in need. The service they provide has five components: glean fruit that would otherwise be wasted, provide fresh produce to the Oregon Food Bank, educate home owners and volunteers on the care and preservation of fruit trees and fruit, register fruit and nut trees throughout the city, and provide a place for the community to come together and connect.
I recently attended a fruit tree harvest in the backyard
of a home in SE Portland. Two large Asian pear trees
needed harvesting, and they generated over 400 lbs. of
fruit! Here is a gallery
of images
I took at the harvest party. If you live in the
Portland area and want to volunteer or have trees that
need harvesting, please visit Portlandfruit.org
for more details.
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Leaburg Fish Hatchery
Leaburg, Oregon
Like the bees, many species of fish and seafood are in trouble. To begin wrapping my head around the issue, I first visited a fish hatchery on one of the top fishing rivers in the country, the McKenzie. Before visiting the hatchery, I naively thought Mother Nature had an endless supply of fish in her rivers and lakes. Then I learned that, without hatcheries, our rivers would be depleted of fish because of commercial and recreational fishing and the building of dams. Last year, Oregon's hatcheries added about 30 million fish to its rivers and lakes. The Leaburg Hatchery is special because of its Aquatic Education Park built by manager Tim Wright. You can learn more about the park and the hatchery by visiting my gallery of photos.
I'd like to thank Tiffany and Scott Haugen for introducing me to Tim and for taking me trout fishing on the McKenzie River. If you'd like to see photos of the HUGE trout I caught, please check out my blog.
Here's a hard link to this newsletter if you'd like to print it and/or share it with a friend.
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Chuck Sowers harvests honey combs.
Honey ready to be bottled.
A volunteer gleans fruit from a neighbor's backyard.
A bounty of Asian pears.
Josh Knoevel clips the adipose fin from a fingerling. All trout from the hatchery are marked by having their adipose fins clipped.
 Part of the Aquatic Education Park at the Leaburg Hatchery.
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