Diana Sammataro and Alphonse Avitabile have created the best single-volume guide to the hobby and profession of beekeeping. The Beekeeper's Handbook provides step-by-step instructions for setting up an apiary, handling bees, and working throughout the season to maintain a healthy colony and a generous supply of honey. Various colony care options and techniques are explained so that beekeepers can make the best choices for their hives.
The Beekeeper's Handbook is an invaluable resource for both beginner and veteran beekeepers. This fully updated and expanded fifth edition includes: Hand-drawn instructional diagrams that provide step-by-step instructions Updated research regarding the health and behaviors of bees in different habitats and what operations may best suit individual needs Information on how to identify, treat, and prevent the introduction of Varroa destructor mites and other harmful intruders in a colony
Diana Sammataro is a retired bee scientist who has been writing and teaching beekeeping for over twenty years. She is coauthor of The New Starting Right with Bees.
Alphonse Avitabile is a beekeeper, a bee researcher, and Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut, Waterbury. His published articles can be found in scientific journals and in the American Bee Journal and Bee Culture.
Since the publication of the first edition of the handbook in 1973, many thousands of novice and experienced beekeepers have relied on this book as the preferred single-volume guide to bee keeping
Our Changing Menu unpacks the increasingly complex relationships between food and climate change. Whether you're a chef, baker, distiller, restaurateur, or someone who simply enjoys a good pizza or drink, it's time to come to terms with how climate change is affecting our diverse and interwoven food system.
Michael P. Hoffmann, Carrie Koplinka-Loehr, and Danielle L. Eiseman offer an eye-opening journey through a complete menu of before-dinner drinks and salads; main courses and sides; and coffee and dessert. Along the way they examine the escalating changes occurring to the flavors of spices and teas, the yields of wheat, the vitamins in rice, and the price of vanilla. Their story is rounded out with a primer on the global food system, the causes and impacts of climate change, and what we can all do. Our Changing Menu is a celebration of food and a call to action?encouraging readers to join with others from the common ground of food to help tackle the greatest challenge of our time.
Michael P. Hoffmann is Professor Emeritus at Cornell University.
Carrie Koplinka-Loehr is a freelance writer with an MS in science education from Cornell University.
Danielle L. Eiseman is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Communication at Cornell University.
Our Changing Menu is a detailed, lively overview of how the world's most popular eats arrive to the table under more and more challenging conditions... The book's concise analysis of climate science and its effects on water, soil, pests, pollinators, and pathogens is engaging and accessible.
Our Changing Menu is an excellent introduction to the science behind our changing planet and the problems presented by climate change. Where the book is most successful is the way it takes a massive problem, and breaks it down into solutions that can lead to meaningful action.
This book is very well researched and easy to read. It is also recommended for anyone wanting to expand their knowledge about global food systems and how we can keep on enjoying the foods we know and love in an uncertain time of global change.
Bird Talk delves into new scientific developments to reveal the complexities of how birds make, learn, and use sound in a bewildering array of songs and calls. The beauty of birdsong is one of the joys of nature, and this book reveals how songs are learnt and performed, why the quality of a male's repertoire can affect his mating success, and how birds use song-matching and countersinging in territorial disputes.
Bird Talk illustrates how birds communicate through visual signals too, from the dazzling feathers of a Peacock to the jumping displays a Jackson's Widowbird performs to show off his long tail. Plumage features such as the red bill shield of a Pukeko can indicate dominance, and how aggressive wing-waving is used to ward off impostors.
Bird Talk will help you understand how birds communicate in a range of situations, whether in harmony or in conflict, providing essential new insight into avian intelligence.
Barbara Ballentine is Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at Western Carolina University. She has published articles on song production and mate choice.
Jeremy Hyman is Professor in the Department of Biology at Western Carolina University, where he teaches ornithology and animal behavior. He has published numerous articles on bird behavior and is the author of the children's book Bird Brains.
Consultant Editor Mike Webster is the Robert G. Engel Professor of Ornithology in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University and Director of the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
I highly recommend this book for anyone who is passionate about ornithology and birding, and interested in expanding their knowledge about the different ways that birds communicate, as well as the impacts of human activity on birdsong and other behavior.
Bird Talk: An Exploration of Avian Communication is a very good and surprisingly relatively inexpensive way to expand one's knowledge of birds and what we know about how they communicate by song, movement, physical appearance, and smell. [The book makes] scientific information easily available, effortless to read and process, primarily through the use of stunning visual material to engage our eyes and spike our interest.
Among the largest of all insects, dragonflies and damselflies are conspicuous. Active during the day, often brightly colored, and extremely photogenic?something about their appearance and dashing flight suggests a primeval world of tree ferns and dinosaurs.
The first guide of its kind, this book includes an in-depth introduction with an overview of Costa Rican biodiversity and illustrated morphological terms. The species accounts show males and females of most species, detailed illustrations and close-ups of key distinguishing features, and descriptions of habitat, behavior, and range. Dragonflies and Damselflies of Costa Rica gives readers the information they need to identify nearly every species in the country. Experienced dragonfly fans and new enthusiasts alike will find it an indispensable resource.
Dennis Paulson is a world authority on Odonata, which he has been studying for more than fifty years. His many books include Dragonflies and Damselflies of the West and Dragonflies and Damselflies.
William Haber has been researching insects and plants in Costa Rica since 1972. He has described six new species of Odonata from Costa Rica, with more in the works.
When terrorists attacked on September 11, 2001, Lieutenant Brian Murphy rescued seven people from the World Trade Center. Even as steel girders buckled and groaned, Brian rushed back up the stairs of the North Tower in search of those in need. He died a hero, one of more than four hundred police officers, firefighters, and other first responders who perished that fateful day.
Three years later, Vietnam veteran and retired NYPD detective-sergeant Jimmy Murphy is on a mission to find the truth behind his son's death. Why was Brian in the tower that morning? Had he anticipated the attack? Suspecting a cover-up of a deeper truth, Jimmy must confront his family, friends, and old colleagues in the police department to discover what happened to Brian and who his eldest son really was.
Murphy's investigation takes him from his home turf in the Irish American enclave of Rockaway Beach to Muslim Atlantic Avenue and beyond in order to find his own truth about 9/11. Dry-eyed and determined, Murphy battles barstool patriotism, the NYPD blue wall of silence, and a ticking clock?all the while haunted by his own secrets and the raw memory of his difficult relationship with his dead son.
Written by author and musician Larry Kirwan, Rockaway Blue is a thrilling and poignant story of a family struggling to pull itself together after an unthinkable trauma.
Larry Kirwan was the leader of New York-based Irish political rock band Black 47 for 25 years. He is author of five previous books, including, Liverpool Fantasy, Rockin' The Bronx, and Green Suede Shoes, and seventeen plays and musicals, including Paradise Square which will open on Broadway in 2022. He is currently working on a stage version of The Informer. Kirwan also hosts Celtic Crush a popular radio show on Sirius/XM and writes a column for The Irish Echo.
Larry Kirwan's sweeping novel, "Rockaway Blue," is a defiant and celebratory tour of Irish-American life in the town best known for the long-gone amusement park and the Ramones' 1970s siren song that gleefully beckons: "we can hitch a ride to Rock, Rock, Rockaway Beach."
Rockaway Blue is a well-told, emotional journey... Rockaway Blue is a great read, Highly Recommended, and a Top Shelf Selection.
A Wild Idea shares the complete story of the difficult birth of the Adirondack Park Agency (APA). The Adirondack region of New York's rural North Country forms the nation's largest State Park, with a territory as large as Vermont. Planning experts view the APA as a triumph of sustainability that balances human activity with the preservation of wild ecosystems. The truth isn't as pretty. The story of the APA, told here for the first time, is a complex, troubled tale of political dueling and communities pushed to the brink of violence.
The North Country's environmental movement started among a small group of hunters and hikers, rose on a huge wave of public concern about pollution that crested in the early 1970s, and overcame multiple obstacles to "save" the Adirondacks. Edmondson shows how the movement's leaders persuaded a powerful Governor to recruit planners, naturalists, and advisors and assign a task that had never been attempted before. The team and the politicians who supported them worked around the clock to draft two visionary land-use plans and turn them into law. But they also made mistakes, and their strict regulations were met with determined opposition from local landowners who insisted that private property is private.
A Wild Idea is based on in-depth interviews with five dozen insiders who are central to the story. Their observations contain many surprising and shocking revelations. This is a rich, exciting narrative about state power and how it was imposed on rural residents. It shows how the Adirondacks were "saved," and also why that campaign sparked a passionate rebellion.
Brad Edmondson is the author of Environmental Affairs in New York State, Ice Cream Social, and Postwar Cornell. Visit bradedmondson.com for more information.
Edmondson has told his complicated story well. He writes clearly, shows a grasp of broad swaths of information and opinion, and capably explains how the various players evolved in their thinking. A Wild Idea merits the attention of everyone deeply interested in the Adirondack region.
Brad Edmondson's thoroughly researched book details the difficult process behind the enactment of this law.
Brad Edmondson, the author of A Wild Idea, published to coincide with the anniversary of Governor Nelson Rockefeller's signing of the APA bill on June 25, 1971, reminds us how broadly popular environmentalism was in the early 70s, unifying a nation still fractured along generational, cultural and political fault lines.
A Wild Idea is essential reading for anyone interested in how human beings can coexist in reasonable harmony with our natural world.
Much of the journalistic-style narrative reported in A Wild Idea is derived from Edmondson's more than five dozen interviews with people who, in one way or another, were first-hand participants in the APA's founding. While the author's sympathies are clearly aligned with the APA and its supporters, his text offers a fair, measured treatment of the arguments, reasoning, and passions of opponents.
A Wild Idea is an important and timely intervention in Adirondack historiography as well as a helpful addition, particularly in its methodology, to the study of the American wilderness movement and the history of regional planning.