Most Americans don't know Canada is their Biggest Oil Supplier

From CBC.ca

A new poll suggests the vast majority of Americans are unaware that Canada is the largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the U.S.

The Canadian American Business Council (CABC) — which represents some of the biggest private sector companies in both countries — said its survey of 1,000 Americans found that only four per cent of respondents thought Canada was the country that provided them with more oil than anyone else.

Canada is the biggest foreign supplier of oil and natural gas to the U.S.

The survey also found that 41 per cent of Americans asked would support replacing oil from unstable areas of the world with oil from Canada "even if doing so resulted in higher prices for U.S. consumers."

"The findings suggest a foundation of American public support for meaningful initiatives to expand Canadian energy supplies to the U.S.," said CABC chairman Randoph Dove in a statement.

"As more and more Americans recognize Canada as a secure source of energy resources, this support should only increase," he said.

The release of this poll came just as energy-rich Alberta launched a massive lobbying effort in Washington to get across its message that Canada — and especially Alberta — has a stable and secure supply of oil that it's eager to sell the U.S.

Exhibits about Alberta and its vast oil sands deposits occupy a prominent place in this year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington.

That's drawn criticism from an environmental lobby group, the National Resources Defence Council, which says the industry and government-sponsored exhibits at the festival make no mention of the "devastating environmental consequences" the council says oil sands mining creates.

The survey was conducted by Vitale & Associates, who interviewed 1,000 people from June 13 to 15. It has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.



Missing Bees Create a Buzz

Whole colonies are vanishing across the country

By Maurice Possley
From The Chicago Tribune
2007

The disappearance and deaths of millions of honeybees in nearly half of the nation's states is a mystery seemingly befitting an episode of "CSI" and is threatening an estimated $14 billion in crops that rely on pollination.

In an inconspicuous office suite here—the home of Bee Alert Technology Inc.—scientists are feverishly working to solve an entomological mystery: What happened to tens of thousands of honeybee colonies in at least 24 states?

These are crime scenes without bodies. Beekeepers have been opening hives and instead of finding thriving colonies with as many as 60,000 bees, they find an apian ghost town.

"It's called Colony Collapse Disorder," said Jerry Bromenshenk, a University of Montana professor and head of Bee Alert who has studied honeybees for more than three decades. "We don't know that it's a disease, we don't know if it's due to management practices by beekeepers. There are so many variables. We can't yet find a common denominator."

This baffling situation has sent shock waves through the agriculture industry nationwide, particularly almond growers in California, where 80 percent of the world's almonds are produced. The growers rely on pollination by bees.

While the U.S. honey-production industry generates more than $150 million annually, honeybees' pollination of crops is valued at about $14 billion a year, according to a Cornell University study. Beekeepers truck billions of bees to orchards and farms to pollinate crops including apples, grapes, cucumbers, cauliflower, cherries and almonds.

About three decades ago, S.E. McGregor, an apiculturist from Arizona, estimated that one-third of what is eaten by humans is a direct result of the work of honeybees. Bromenshenk suspects that today McGregor's words are an understatement.

On Thursday, a U.S. Department of Agriculture subcommittee on horticulture and organic agriculture is scheduled to conduct a public hearing on the collapse of honeybee colonies. Bromenshenk says the panel will consider the need for money for immediate research, future funding for a sustained examination and whether to set aside money to compensate beekeepers who have been virtually wiped out.

Just when this phenomenon began is hard to pin down, Bromenshenk said, because the reporting of problems is not organized. He said he first went to Florida late last year to investigate a report of empty hives, but as the problem has gained notoriety , more and more reports have emerged.

Bromenshenk is part of a national task force attempting to figure out why bees leave their hives and don't return. He recently returned from California with thousands of dead bees that he suspects were in colonies in the midst of collapsing.

Those bees have been turned over to Dave Wick, whose company, BVS Inc. of Stevensville, Mont., conducts biological screening in an attempt to determine whether an as-yet-unidentified virus is responsible for the mass disappearance.

"We are … trying to figure out the unknown," Wick said in an interview. "This is a devastating situation. If every honeybee disappeared tomorrow, we would still have produce in our markets—it just wouldn't come from the United States."

Bromenshenk's addition to the team studying the bees' disappearance was prompted by the significant research he has conducted at the university as well as the company that spun off from that work.

The firm has learned how to train bees to perform a variety of tasks, including sniffing out poisons, a skill that can be applied to such things as land mine detection or use of chemicals in a terrorist attack. Bromenshenk said the company has discovered how to train a bee in less than a day to identify things by smell or by sight.

While Illinois is not on the list of states where Colony Collapse Disorder has been discovered, Steve Chard, an apiary inspection supervisor with the Illinois Department of Agriculture, said this past week that one possible case has been reported by a beekeeping hobbyist in Decatur who lost nine colonies.

"It's too early to tell for the most part because the weather is just starting to warm up enough to open up hives," Chard said. "We do have one suspected case from Decatur and samples have been sent to the [U.S. Department of Agriculture] for testing. There's no conclusive evidence."

In Michigan, Terry Klein, vice president of the Michigan Beekeepers Association and a commercial beekeeper, said reports of huge losses are beginning to filter in.

"One beekeeper started with 1,500 hives and had only 500 colonies left," Klein said. "Over three or four more weeks, he lost 70 percent of those."

Klein, of St. Charles, Mich., said he lost 80 percent of his bees, but he blames bad weather and mites.

"It's a hard thing to pin down," he said. "You can't autopsy the bodies if they are gone. I am concerned about my survival."

Bromenshenk said that beekeeping largely hasn't changed in more than a century and that the reports coming in don't point to a single cause. "It doesn't appear to be related to poor practices or to those who are organic or those who are not organic," he said.

He suspects that the phenomenon has occurred before, but because reporting practices were not as sophisticated and because the problems have been more publicized, more and more credible reports are being made. He said something similar wiped out millions of bees in Texas, Louisiana and several other Southern states about 50 years ago, but the cause never was determined.

The company is seeking reports from any affected beekeepers at a Web site, www.beesurvey.com. More than 400 reports have been filed, but Bromenshenk hopes to get 10 times that number.

"We don't know if this is something new or if it's cyclic," Bromenshenk said. "It is amazing that millions of bees have disappeared across the U.S."

"We've got to figure this out this time," he said. "We've had beekeepers tell us they are going out of business. The public forgets what a critical role bees play in pollination. This is devastating."