Mason Bee Revolution
Mason Bee Revolution

Author: Dave Hunter

Publisher: Mountaineers Books

Published: 2016-03-22

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1594859647

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• Author Dave Hunter is at the leading edge of bee and pollinator issues • Mason bees are part of the solution to honeybees’ decline • No other bee book addresses the topic with such depth and interest • Includes useful information about leafcutter bees too! The national media regularly features dire stories on honeybee colony collapse and its danger to our food supply. But there's another, unsung bee that has the potential to save the planet—the mason bee. Mason Bee Revolution explains how docile, hard-working, solitary mason bees (and their compatriots, the leafcutter bees) are even more productive pollinators than honeybees, and keeping them can be a fun, easy, backyard hobby for gardeners, conservationists, foodies, and families everywhere. Why these bees? Bee pollination is critical for about 80 percent of US agricultural crops, increasing crop value by an estimated $15 billion annually. Since 2006, nearly a third of all honeybee hives have been lost each year, due to parasites, pesticides, habitat loss, climate change, and a newer malady called Colony Collapse Disorder. While scientists search for answers to save the honeybee, Dave Hunter and his company, Crown Bees, are leading the effort to increase the population of other highly efficient pollinators: One mason bee can produce twelve pounds of cherries, via pollination, where it would take sixty honey bees to achieve the same. Mason Bee Revolution is an easy-to-follow guide to keeping both mason and leafcutter bees. It tells you how to set up, care for, and harvest your own bees and what types of plants and habitat encourage mason and leafcutter bees, as well as provides general information on other common pollinators and bee-related facts, projects, and personalities.

Mason-Dixon
Mason-Dixon

Author: Edward G. Gray

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2023-10-24

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0674295242

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The first comprehensive history of the Mason-Dixon Line—a dramatic story of imperial rivalry and settler-colonial violence, the bonds of slavery and the fight for freedom. The United States is the product of border dynamics—not just at international frontiers but at the boundary that runs through its first heartland. The story of the Mason-Dixon Line is the story of America’s colonial beginnings, nation building, and conflict over slavery. Acclaimed historian Edward Gray offers the first comprehensive narrative of the America’s defining border. Formalized in 1767, the Mason-Dixon Line resolved a generations-old dispute that began with the establishment of Pennsylvania in 1681. Rivalry with the Calverts of Maryland—complicated by struggles with Dutch settlers in Delaware, breakneck agricultural development, and the resistance of Lenape and Susquehannock natives—had led to contentious jurisdictional ambiguity, full-scale battles among the colonists, and ethnic slaughter. In 1780, Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery inaugurated the next phase in the Line’s history. Proslavery and antislavery sentiments had long coexisted in the Maryland–Pennsylvania borderlands, but now African Americans—enslaved and free—faced a boundary between distinct legal regimes. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the Mason-Dixon Line became a federal instrument to arrest the northward flow of freedom-seeking Blacks. Only with the end of the Civil War did the Line’s significance fade, though it continued to haunt African Americans as Jim Crow took hold. Mason-Dixon tells the gripping story of colonial grandees, Native American diplomats, Quaker abolitionists, fugitives from slavery, capitalist railroad and canal builders, US presidents, Supreme Court justices, and Underground Railroad conductors—all contending with the relentless violence and political discord of a borderland that was a transformative force in American history.