You may remember that I recently reported on Indian farmers protecting their crops against elephants with bee hives (elephants hate bees), however, because the hives were attracting sloth bears, there’s a new dimension – bees and gum trees.
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A new booklet aimed at South African landowners features the happy relationship between bees and gum trees. The booklet calls on expert opinions from all quarters and the results are very helpful, subtitling the publication to, ‘Gums in the correct place in the landscape’.
Gum trees, or eucalyptus, are supposed to be Public Enemy Number One, but this is not necessarily so. Some species of eucalyptus are valuable to bees and bees are essential when it comes to food crop fertilisation and therefore food security.
There are new regulations governing gum trees and it is up to the landowner with gums on the land to establish which species they are and whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ gums. The booklet gives invaluable advice to the landowner and hopefully some succour for bees.
So, instead of bees versus elephants, it’s bees and gum trees. The book is ‘Gums & Bees: A Roadmap for Landowners in South Africa’ and it is backed by, among others, the Department of Environmental Affairs, the South African National Biodiversity Institute, the United Nations Environmental Programme and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
It’s a most useful little booklet, better get a copy and check out your gum trees.
And now… we were given a bottle of body lotion the other day. “So…?” I can hear you say. Well, it’s a bottle of body lotion containing multiple things found in and around the Dead Sea in Israel and it’s made right there, in Israel.
There are no less than 21 ingredients, including olive oil, citrus peel oil, borage seed oil and evening primrose oil – one might wonder why you don’t put it on your salad rather than your body. Anyway, this Israeli body lotion all the way from the Dead Sea is excellent, lovely stuff.
I’ve been to the Dead Sea with a small media group. It’s famous for the fact that it is so saline that you can float on the surface and read the newspaper. The beaches are famous because they are black mud, not your everyday black mud, but black mud that cures all evils.
I have no idea why anyone would want to float on their backs to read the newspaper or why anyone would want to frolic in black mud, but my colleagues certainly tried the latter. I remember the Dead Sea for one other thing – much later that day, in the evening actually, I was in my room channel-hopping on Israeli TV, not with a great deal of success.
I even came across the infamous film ‘Lolita’ (very banned in the old South Africa). I tried to watch it for a while, but watching a frolicking Marlon Brando speaking French with Hebrew sub-titles palled after a very short time.
So, look out for both – the gum tree book and the magic black mud from the Dead Sea.
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