Let's BEE a Pollinator Haven

In honor of Pollinator Week I wrote another op-ed for the local paper...but you get to read it here first!



This week, June 19-25^th is Pollinator Week!  This year for Pollinator Week we should commit to stop the use of neonicotinoid pesticides and increase our pollinator habitat.  Illinois is in a unique position to help pollinators by restoring much needed native prairie land.  We should inspire others by becoming the first community in Illinois to pass resolutions declaring ourselves a safe haven for pollinators.

Pesticides are chemicals used to kill harmful animals or plants, and they include herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides.  Neonicotinoids are a class of insecticides that have a chemical structure similar to nicotine and act on the nervous system of insects.

Insecticides function in various ways.  Neonicotinoid insecticides can kill by disrupting the nervous system, acting as an endotoxin, damaging the exoskeleton, and causing infertility. While some insecticides claim to target certain species, most do not discriminate.

That means we’re not just killing pests, we’re killing all the beneficial species as well.  Hummingbirds, bats, small mammals, beetles, and moths are also important pollinators adversely affected by pesticides.  Birds and aquatic species in particular have shown high mortality rates in the presence of neonicotinoid pesticides. It is also important to remember insecticides are not killing off pests for good; they are only creating greater resistance of mosquitoes and other pests in the future.

We must stop buying these chemical products that are doing more harm than good, and we must hold officials accountable for spraying our communities.  I often see state workers spraying pesticides along the side and median areas of interstates.
 These are tankards of chemical toxins driving and spraying along the interstate.  And we need to be asking ourselves what for?! Why are we spraying unpopulated areas along interstates? Who is profiting from it? Why should we be poisoning the environment, wildlife, pollinators, and ourselves when instead we could be planting native prairie seeds?

How much of our tax money is spent on pesticides? 

When you read the material safety data sheets on even the least toxic chemical alternatives on the market, they state possible carcinogen.

We are wasting money on pesticides we apply to our yards, and we are allowing the state to use our money by killing off pollinators and the environment.

We should be asking questions such as what are these toxins being sprayed in my community?  Who is responsible for the use of pesticides in this area? What are they spraying for?  Are there safer alternatives?

 Is a trained professional applying these pesticides? What physical harm is being done to workers using pesticides?   What medical costs and injuries are associated with the use of pesticides by workers?

The good news is YOU can start helping pollinators now.  Pollinators can use all the help they can get, so start planting.  Even 1 plant on your porch or doorstep can provide food! If you have more room, you can grow a variety of plants that bloom throughout the year.  You can also help pollinators by providing access to uncontaminated water and installing bat and bee houses. Do your own research about chemicals. You can learn more at websites like Beyond Pesticides, Pesticide Action Network, and the Pollinator Partnership.

Beneficial pollinators are what make this world flourish with foods and flowers of every color.  What would the world be without monarchs, swallowtails, and honeybees? And what would be left to eat?

We should come together as a community and put {Insert City Here} on the map as a bee haven.  We need to stop poisoning the environment and let nature do as it was intended to, and the fruits of nature will unfold.

All the Beauty and Peace

When your coworker brings in a breakfast sandwich to split, and orders vegetarian for you, it's going to be a good day!

So buy somebody a sandwich. Be the better person and show kindness to someone you don't really want to. Pet an ugly animal. Spare that scary spider you were going to squish. 

Mostly take a moment to show love and change a beings mood or maybe their whole outlook in life.

The World could use all the beauty and peace we have to give.

Mounting Kit

The old 4 Ladies and a Beaker is all but fizzled out and dissolved like sodium bicarbonate.

Gone are the days my SPE partner would leave me notes like this.

Our lab finally has new management, and the crew has doubled in size.

We've taken on research and development projects of new E.P.A. methods. 

Drinking water regulations are ever expanding as new pesticides and herbicides are allowed on the market.

I think management learned a lesson from the last batch of catty women new hires and has hired all men. 

This picture of Gidget perfectly sums up the feeling in the lab with 3 unhappy women.

I'm certain that the tension wafted out of our room, and floated down the hallways as volatile as methylene chloride.

Not that I'll change the name, but our group now more appropriately could be called:

 4 Dudes and a Hot Plate...

Or

4 Dudes and a Buchner...

Buchners on top, Beakers on bottom

Or my personal favorite:

4 Dudes 2 Ladies and a Mounting Kit...

Extractions room has finally calmed down in the aftermath of an explosive year.

We've even expanded rooms to develop our drinking water methods. 

This room has a window! Like a cat, we take full advantage of the sun spots coming in. A lab worker has to get their vitamin D in somehow.

Sailing the high seas...in my dreams

I don't know if it was my adoration of flowing water, my pirate fetish, or the recent dive I took into H.P Lovecraft stories that drove me to work on a deep sea hood creation.

Sharpie stroke by stroke our underwater scene grew. It took close to a year to finish with our lack of free time, but by the end multiple people in various parts of the lab contributed.

It is gorgeous outside, but the only sun rays I can see sneak through bushes and bookshelves to fall sparingly along the cold hallways of the lab. 

So I daydream.

 At work the samples pile high, but in my mind only, sunshine glitters off the waves creating prisms of rainbows in the water as schools of fish swim through. Sharks and octopi feel the freedom of the vast ocean. 

I stand on my boat deck sword in hand, Captain of the ship, as I watch the waves roll by.

Sailing the high seas...In my dreams.

Good Mourning Dove

I might be a chemist, but my love has always been biology. Walking into work the other day I saw these tiny birds, so I dropped all my bags and took pictures. Hard to see but they are poking their tiny bird heads out of these 2 blue pipes. 

Animals are always surprising me with their innovations.

The next morning I got out of my car and saw this bird perched on a co-workers vehicle.

I always leave the building for lunch. It is a half hour retreat to run away from the lab walls that confine me. 

A half hour where I park next to trees in a parking lot, the closest I can get to being outdoors.

This lunch held a special treat for me though as a family of geese crossed my path.

Fuzzy yellow gosling tails waddling down an alley is all it takes to make me smile. 

So I go back to work and think thanks nature for letting me enjoy you for a couple minutes more.

Toluene and Tequila

Ronda used to say our extractions room is like the obliette of Labrinth, where people are forgotten. 

 In our windowless room, at the end of the building, I think sometimes she was right. 

Now even Ronda the mama bear I thought would be here forever has gone. Like a bear she growled and roared and fought her way out of the obliette.

On Ronda's last day I came home and 

suddenly realized I was the last of our 4 ladies and a beaker crew. So I poured myself a shot.

It was a year of losing friends in a blur of chemically induced memories. 

Of my 5 years now this last one, held the most change for me at work. It really was the end of an era when our boss and my SPE partner left. After they left, our extractions group fell away like dominoes. 

I watched from my SPE counter as an entire new cast was hired into the 4 ladies and a beaker show.

My new SPE partner became Bacti Kim. Not to be confused with the original Kim, who still works here, but has moved up to instrumentation.

Shipping Dept made this sign of Bacti Kim and I ~minion style

Hiring new people was a harder task for management than it should have been, leaving us understaffed, under appreciated, and overworked.

Many days I went to work and thought I'd be walking out the doors later singing Take this job and shove it!

Bacti Kim found this meme in the midst of some of our worst days here and thought this looked like us in SPE. She says I have a good joker face, and she is definately a good instigating beetlejuice. We laughed everytime we looked at it, until management made us take it down.

Which brings me back to the title of this post: Toluene and Tequila. 

Days at work this year have been especially long and hard. We had our share of ether highs and ethyl acetate lows. 

Maybe this is why we think of margaritas often.

We worked hardest at keeping our sanity many days. 

We celebrated often the achievement of making it through another day of work. 

At happy hour we were just your average environmental scientists, chemists, biologists, and geologists coming together to appreciate some of the finer points of chemistry.

So that was a year of laboratory hell in a nutshell. 

Just me and "The Kims" trying to survive extractions through a lot of tequila therapy.

Let's face it, when it comes to tough science, alcohol is the solution.

This is what we look like the next day coming to work.

I'm in love with The Mahones right now and this song is the inspiration for the post title. I hope The Queen and Tequila gets stuck in your head too!

Links

Here's some Toluene info

http://www.safecosmetics.org/get-the-facts/chemicals-of-concern/toluene/