The mysterious decline of our domestic honey bee populations, due to a syndrome dubbed "Colony Collapse Disorder," affects all of us (well, all of us who eat food, anyway). As a beekeeper I have seen how interacting with the blessed bees brings us into intimate contact with Nature. During Reclaiming's Spiral Dance each year, my team builds a display made of the fruits, vegetables, and flowers made possible solely or partly due to the efforts of bees. We also bring petitions and postcards for sending to Congress or the EPA to direct more efforts into understanding and reversing the bees' devastation, and to support efforts to improve awareness such as The Great Sunflower Project and Vanishing of the Bees.
More recently, I have also been honored to join a growing cadre of AIDS activists supporting research for finding not just treatments, but a cure, for AIDS. This is no longer a goal considered pie-in-the-sky--unless that pie is the Moon, in which case: We got there. Been there, done that. And we can do the same for an AIDS cure. Please check out the work by the team at AIDS Policy Project.
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Feb 11, 2011 update: Besides working on my new practice, I'm happy to announce that the HIV conference for the Coachella Valley: April 9, 2011. The event will offer CME credit to medical professionals and workshops in English and Spanish for local patients and providers. A working title for the meeting is "From Surviving to Thriving." The agenda will include workshops by AIDS Policy Project members and a panel by three teams of U.S.-based stem cell researchers working for a cure for HIV.
The Palm Springs Library recently hosted a showing of Vanishing of the Bees. I'm sorry to say that my mom's hive in San Jose was among the casualties of the mass bee die-off in the San Francisco Bay Area last October. I'm still scouting for a site down here in Southern California to have a hive.
