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50 Ways Your Web Site Is Discouraging Conversions — and How to Fix It: "If your Web site gets great traffic but no sales or sign-ups to back it up, it's time to take a good, hard look at it. Chances are, your site is scaring off customers. Follow these tips to make your Web site more friendly to customers and encourage better conversion rates."
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The HotForWords channel on YouTube (and its creator) celebrated its 100 millionth view this week:Here's the channel:HotForWords channelIt's a very simple idea (explanations of word etymology) wrapped in a sexy package.Lest you think that this sort of popularity is limited to attractive women, here is a channel that indicates otherwise:What the BuckAnd many other popular YouTube Channels:Most
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Our hosts for August were Debyi of Healthy Vegan Kitchen and Lori of Lip Smacking Goodness. (The pictures through out the post are from Nikki of Canary Girl, Kat of A Good Appetite and Jen of Delightful Delicacies.) Here is what Debyi posted.

"For the August Challenge, I was trying to decide what was one thing I love to eat, but have never really made. A couple of things came to mind, but there was really no obvious choice. My favorite food that I can't seem to eat out, because of my food allergies, is Tamales! I love tamales, I can never get enough of them. Served with refried beans and Spanish rice, or topped with chili. In my pre-vegan days, I would serve them with scrambled eggs and salsa. There are so many possibilities. You can make them full fat or low fat, vegan or not, although I would challenge you to make them vegan as a great challenge! You can choose your own filling, though I have included some fillings to give you some ideas. Feel free to cut the Basic Tamale recipe in half since it does make a lot, but they freeze well, so if you make the full recipe, you can easily freeze them for tamales anytime. Don't be afraid by how many pages this is. It's long because there are filling options at the end.

I was able to find corn husks in the bulk spice section and the Hispanic aisle of my local chain grocery stores (Fry's and Safeway). Hopefully you will be able to find all the ingredients easily. Bob's Red Mill makes masa harina which I found in the health food section of my grocery store, but I know it is also available on the Hispanic aisle as well. "

Please visit people on the blog roll for their interpretations. Lots of inspiration and ideas out there.

Basic Tamale Recipe
by Chef Jason Wyrick of The Vegan Culinary Experience
Serves: 24 Time to Prepare: 1 hour

12 cups of masa harina flour
10 cups of water or veggie stock (see below for some tasty stock options,
this amount may also vary depending on the type of masa you use)
1 tbsp. of salt
3 cups of vegetable shortening (Option: 2 cups of oil or margarine
instead of the shortening)
24 dried corn husks
Water to soak the husks
Option: 1 tbsp. of baking powder

1. Warm the stock. Combine the masa harina flour with the salt (and optional baking powder.) Stir the vegetable shortening rapidly until it is creamy.
2. Pour the stock into the masa mix and stir until it is thoroughly combined. Beat the moist masa mix into the shortening until you have a paste that will spread with a knife without breaking apart. You should end up with a semi-thick paste. If you do not have this, you can add more stock in ¼ cup amounts to the mix until you have the right consistency.
3. To check the consistency, spread the masa on a corn husk and if it spreads easily while staying together, you have the right consistency.
Option: If you use oil instead of the shortening, add it to the dry masa and then add the stock to the masa.
4. Soak the corn husks for at least 2 minutes. (Some husks may still have the silks in them, make sure you remove them before using)
5. Spread masa paste over the top half of a corn husk (the top half is the wide half.) Spoon a line of your filling of choice in a line on one side of the masa paste. Roll the tamale from the filling side to the other side. You will end up with one half of the roll that has masa paste and one that does not. Fold the half that does not have the masa paste against the tamale, folding it in towards the flap of the roll.
6. Repeat this process with the rest of the ingredients.
7. Steam the tamales for 45 minutes. If you have a lot of tamales and a tall steamer, you can place the tamales vertically in the steamer.

Stock Options:

*Boil 2 dates and a pinch of salt with each cup of water for 10 minutes & then remove the dates.
*Simmer one dried ancho, chipotle, or other chile of your choice per 3 cups of water for 10 minutes and then remove the chile (use the rehydrated chile in your filling.)
Use veggie stock instead of water.
*Simmer 6 cloves of garlic per cup of water for 15 minutes, removing the garlic when you are finished.
*Simmer 1 tbsp. of peppercorns and 1 cinnamon stick per 2 cups of water for 10 minutes,straining the stock when you are done.

Whichever stock you use, allow it to cool down to a warm temperature before you use it or else the heat will cook the masa.

Low-fat Version:
Tamales obviously have quite a bit of fat in them, even with the large amount of carbohydrate heavy masa. You can cut the fat content down by about ¼ by adding in about half the amount of stock as removed fat. Thus, if you remove 1 cup of fat, add in ½ cup of stock. Play with this until you get the smooth paste consistency. Keep in mind that the fat binds the masa together, so you may find that your tamales fall apart more often without the traditional amount of fat.

For another low fat option:(from Dr. John McDougall)
Tamale Batter:

12 cups masa harina
2 tsp salt2 tsp pepper
2 tsp oregano
2 tsp baking powder
9 cups water, soymilk, vegetable broth or a combination of all three
4 tsp cider vinegar
24 dried corn husks

1. Stir together the masa harina, salt, pepper, oregano, and baking powder in a large bowl. In a small bowl, stir together the water (soymilk, vegetable broth) and the vinegar.
2. Make a well in the center of the dry mixture and pour the wet mixture into the dry. Stir togther using your hands or a wooden spoon (you can also use a stand mixture).
3. Open a corn husk and spread the batter over it. Spoon 1 to 2 tablespoons of the filling of your choice in the center of the corn husk. Wrap the batter around the filling, then wrap the husk around it. Tie or twist the ends of the husk closed.
4. Steam for 30 minutes. Serve immediately, plain, or with enchilada sauce spooned on top. (I did half the recipe and still came out with 24, but mine were a little on the small side)

Some people had a hard time finding Corn Husks to wrap there Tamales in. So our host Debyi came to the rescue with this.

Tamal wrappers:
Fresh corn husks are used, chiefly, to wrap fresh corn tamales, which are an especial delicacy of the State of Michoacan, and are called uchepos. Read Diana Kennedy in her Art of Mexican Cooking to find out about them. In Mexico they are made from fresh field corn (dent, flint, or flour corns), and the kernels contain sufficient starch to hold together when they are steamed. Here, using our sweet corn, you need to toss in a bit of cornstarch to bind them together. The fresh corn masa is dropped into the husk in the curve at its base, and they are then basically rolled up, as they naturally rolled around the ear of corn. They are steamed just like dried corn masa tamales. I don't know that you absolutely couldn't put dried corn masa in a fresh husk and successfully steam a tamal, but typically you see fresh corn/fresh husk, dried corn/dried husk. Tamales are also wrapped in Swiss chard leaves, and the leaves of other edible plants. There is another tamal, the corunda, or ash tamal (the masa is made by boiling diluted wood ash with the corn instead of cal, or calcium hydroxide). They are pyramid shaped, with rounded sides, and they are wrapped in the fresh leaf of the corn plant[i].

Avocado leaves are hard to come by here - you can buy dried ones in the spice and herb section of a Mexican grocery, and use them with, say, black beans, for flavoring. But the big, fresh leaves required for tamal making are scarce - I have never found them here in the States.

Banana leaves are really easy to work with ... if you've got a good source for them. Some markets sell them in packages frozen. They must be 'blanched' by passing them over a flame (stove burner, electric or gas), and as you move the leaf back and forth, you will see it soften, and taken on a gloss. Place the leaf on a flat surface and, using a very sharp knife, cut the central stiff vein out of the leaf. Then cut it crosswise into 10" segments, and you are ready to roll.
Sharon Peters aka "theabroma"

Presentation:
Rolling tamales takes a little practice, but not much, so don’t worry if your first few don’t look good. Just keep rolling! If you want a totally enclosed tamale, you can leave enough room when you spread the masa for a fold on both sides of the husk instead of just one half. You can also take strips of corn husks and make a nice tie around the tamales to help keep them together. Note that if you use the baking powder, they will get slightly fluffy and will break apart easier. Finally, allow the tamales to rest for at least five minutes before unwrapping them. The steamed tamales will be delicate when they first come out of the steamer. Allowing them to rest tightens up the masa.

Time Management:
Tamales have a reputation for being time consuming, but once you get the masa paste, filling, and corn husks prepped, you can make them very quickly. To speed up the time, you can make the filling the day before. The masa paste and the soaked husks take a minimal amount of time to prep. Tamales can be frozen and kept for up to a year.

Complementary Food and Drinks:
Horchata, a sweetened rice milk and cinnamon drink, is a wonderful complement to most tamales.

Where to Shop:
All of the ingredients for the basic tamale can be purchased at any store that caters to Mexican cuisine and may even be available in your local market depending on where you live. When buying the masa, look for finely ground corn flour and only purchase as much as you think you will use within the week. Corn flour has a good amount of oil and that means it will go rancid if stored too long.

How It Works:
The stock is added to the masa instead of the other way around so that the masa does not clump. It is then beat into the shortening, which is used to bind the masa together and make it spreadable, for the same reason (yes, shortening can clump when added to dry or moist ingredients!) They are then steamed so that they stay moist and the masa can finish binding together.

Chef’s Notes:
I use the baking powder option as I prefer my tamales to be just slightly fluffy. When I make them, I generally prepare at least 3 fillings so that I can have a variety of tamales with very little extra work. These are best to make in a large batch and then frozen so that you have tamales ready for a long time to come!

Interesting Facts:
Tamales are a traditional celebration food, especially for Christmas. The more proper form of tamale is actually tamal, with tamales being the plural form.

Black Bean Chipotle Tamale Recipe
by Chef Jason Wyrick of The Vegan Culinary Experience
Serves: 24 Time to Prepare: 1 hour 15 minutes

1 batch of tamale dough (see Basic Tamale recipe)
16 oz. of black beans, rinsed
½ cup of shredded carrot
½ of a red onion, minced
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tsp. of chipotle powder
1 tbsp. of mild New Mexico chile powder
1 tsp. of whole cumin seeds
2 tsp. of whole coriander seeds
½ tsp. of salt
1 tsp. of olive oil
Option: 1 cup of soy chorizo

1. Shred the carrot. Mince the onion and garlic. Rinse the beans. Combine all of these together in a bowl.
2. In a small pan, toast the cumin seeds and coriander seeds on a medium heat in the 1 tsp. of oil until the coriander seeds start to pop or the cumin seeds turn a deep brown color, whichever comes first.
3. Mix the chipotle powder, New Mexico chile powder, cumin, coriander, and salt together. Toss this into the veggie mix.
4. Prepare the Basic Tamale dough according to the Basic Tamale recipe.
5. Prepare the Basic Tamale recipe adding about 1 tbsp. of filling per tamale.
Option: Mix the soy chorizo into the veggies after the spices have been added.

Presentation:
This would look nice atop a bed of Spanish rice garnished with black sesame seeds.

Time Management:
The bean mix can be made quickly, so concentrated on making that first and then make the tamale dough.

Complementary Food and Drinks:
Serve this with a side of grilled corn on the cob that has been tossed in a mild chile powder mix. The smokiness of the grilled corn will complement the chipotle flavor quite well.

Where to Shop:
All of these ingredients should be fairly easy to find.

How It Works:
The smoky richness of chipotle powder greatly enhances the depth of flavor that black beans have. The red onion and carrot give it a touch of sweetness. New Mexico chile powder is added so that the tamale can have more chile flavor without being overwhelmed by the heat of additional chipotle powder. The cumin and coriander seeds are toasted to darken their flavors, which helps them stand out amongst all of the other strong flavors in the recipe.

Chef’s Notes:
It’s hard to go wrong with black beans, onions, and chipotle powder, all which go together to make a great chili, which itself was the inspiration for this filling.

Interesting Facts:
The chipotle is a dried, smoked jalapeno and can be purchased whole or in powdered form. Black beans are very high in iron.

Shredded Seitan and Ancho Tamale Recipe
by Chef Jason Wyrick of The Vegan Culinary Experience
Serves: 24 Time to Prepare: 1 hour 10 minutes (add 45 minutes if you make your own seitan)

1 batch of tamale dough (see Basic Tamale recipe)
2 cups of seitan
3 cloves of garlic, minced
2 dried ancho chiles, crushed
3-4 cups of water
4 bay leaves
1 tsp. of freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp. of cumin
1 tsp. of Mexican oregano
1 tbsp. of chile powder
¼ cup of raisins
2 tbsp. of pepitas

1. Shred the seitan in a food processor by pulsing it several times.
2. Mince the garlic and crush the dried ancho chiles.
3. Bring 3-4 cups of water to a simmer, add in the ancho chiles, the shredded seitan, and the bay leaves. Simmer this for ten minutes.
4. While it is simmering, prepare the tamale dough according to the Basic Tamale recipe.
5. Combine the black pepper, cumin, Mexican oregano, and chile powder together.
6. Drain the water from the simmering seitan and ancho peppers and toss these in the spice mix.
7. Mix in the garlic, raisins, and pepitas.
8. Follow the Basic Tamale recipe for preparation.
Option: If you want to take some extra time, you can use the water from simmering the seitan and ancho peppers as part of the stock for the tamale dough.

Presentation:
If you want to get extra fancy with this tamale, you can make a roasted yellow tomato sauce with cumin, salt, and lime juice. Place a small amount on the bottom of a rectangular plate and then place the finished tamale along the length of the plate. Finish by garnishing it with a wedge of lime and a stuffed green olive. Of course, you can always pile these on a platter and they will be gone soon enough without the fancy plating!

Time Management:
The longer this filling sits, the better it will get. Consider making the filling the night before you plan on using it.

Complementary Food and Drinks:
Serve this tamale with a side of smoked paprika rice and beer glazed onions with mashed black beans. The roasted yellow tomato sauce mentioned above would also go quite well with this one.

Where to Shop:
If I don’t feel like making my own seitan, I’ll usually purchase the White Wave brand from Wild Oats or Whole Foods. The anchos can be purchased at most stores that have a heavy Mexican food section, gourmet markets, and spice stores. If you can’t find them, you can substitute any large dried pepper of your choice. The Mexican oregano can be purchased at the same locations. If you can’t find it, you can substitute a like amount of fresh thyme leaves. Pepitas are green pumpkin seeds and can be found in bulk at most stores that have bulk bins, such as Sprouts.

How It Works:
Simmering the seitan with the bay leaves and crushed anchos infuses it with those great flavors while rehydrating the ancho peppers at the same time. The anchos are crushed before they simmer because they become too hard to chop once they are rehydrated. The pepitas (green pumpkin seeds) are there for texture and bit of soft flavor while the raisins balance the heat of the chiles.

Chef’s Notes:
This most closely resembles a traditional tamale filling, using shredded seitan instead of pork and adding in the traditional peppers. The raisins were inspired by my mom, who used to make tamales with her aunts. One of those aunts would add raisins into the masa and I thought that would work very well in the filling, which it did!

Interesting Facts:
Seitan was created in the 7th century B.C.E. by Buddhist monks in China. Ancho is the Spanish word for “wide.”

Green Corn Tamales Recipe
by Chef Jason Wyrick of The Vegan Culinary Experience
Serves: 24 Time to Prepare: 1 hour (add 30 minutes if you roast your own chiles)

½ batch of tamale dough (see Basic Tamale recipe)*
½ cup of sugar
12 ears of corn
2 cups of roasted chiles in strips (fresh roasted Hatch chiles work
best)
*Substitute 5 cups of soy creamer for 5 cups of the liquid in the Basic Tamale recipe

1. Remove the corn from the cob (or you can use frozen corn kernals if you need to). Grind the corn in a food processor until it is coarse.
2. Prepare the tamale dough according to the Basic Tamale recipe, substituting 5 cups of soy creamer for 5 cups of water.
3. Combine the tamale dough with the ground corn and cut the chiles into strips.
4. Prepare the tamales using the Basic Tamale recipe and adding in 1-3 strips of roasted green peppers for the filling. Unlike the Basic Tamale recipe, however, the spread should be 1/3” to ½” high.

Option: Roast the corn before removing the kernels from the cob.

Presentation:
This looks nice on a plate with a few dots of sweet agave nectar and sprinkles of toasted pepitas.

Time Management:
If you roast your own peppers (I highly suggest this,) get them on the grill and then work on the dough while they are roasting.

Complementary Food and Drinks:
These go well with a crisp beer and a bowl of tortilla soup featuring poblano peppers and zucchini. Those flavors seem to combine quite well with the sweet masa and the roasted green chiles.

Where to Shop:
Soy creamer (Silk is the most popular brand) can be purchased at Sprouts, Whole Foods, Central Market, and other stores of that ilk. It can even be found at some of the newer stores of more common chains like Fry’s. For the peppers, I usually head to my local market and see which green ones look the best.

How It Works:
The soy creamer, sugar, and ground corn combine to make the masa quite sweet, which balances the spicy roasted pepper. Because this masa has a lot more flavor than a regular masa, more of it is used so that it becomes a featured ingredient. The corn is ground so that its fresh sweetness and crispness is evenly distributed throughout the tamales.

Chef’s Notes:
I enjoyed the simplicity of this recipe, which yields incredible results without having to do a lot of fancy work. Sometimes the most elegant recipes are the best ones.

Interesting Facts:
Zacahuil is another name for tamale in southern Mexico. Teosinte is thought to be the genetic parent of maize (corn.)

Quotes From the Forum:

its REAL easy. I cant believe I have put off making them out of fear for 12 years. Ah yeah, thats what I said, twelve years.
Lori of Lip Smacking Goodness

Oh my good golly miss molly these were fabulous!
Every time Hub ate one of these (even days after) he would say "wow".
Jen of Delightful Delicacies

how could you not love anything wrapped in masa? the hardest part for me is waiting for them to cook thoroughly!
Lauren of I'll Eat You

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The Clift notes version:How to Earn Money from Blogging"It's an appealing fantasy: Start a blog. Watch it take off. Then, quit office life, sit at home, and live off the advertising revenue."
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The approach here is so direct...
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I run pretty hard during the week--up early and out fast--so that when a scheduled rest day rolls around, I do what I can to protect it. However, there are three exceptions, three occasions when rest is overruled.

Those three exceptions?

1. A new pair of sneakers
2. A inspirational running story
3. Watching someone else run

Even if running isn't your outlet of choice, I'm sure you can relate. Everyone has that one thing that belongs to them, that one thing that feels as familiar to them as their own two hands. Maybe it's cooking, maybe it's golf, maybe it's fencing. The great thing is, you don't have to be the best at it, heck, you don't even have to be good at it. But it should be three things:

• Enjoyable: you look forward to it or you miss it when you don't do it for a while

• Stress-relieving: it should settle you down, maybe relax you, breathing comes easily and naturally (well, maybe not easily, if it's athletically-induced, but you definitely be breathing)

• Limit-testing: you might start out casually, running a half-mile or baking homemade brownies, but with small successes comes confidence, and with confidence comes risk-taking. Your thing pushes you to expand and to grow within it. Maybe a half-mile turns into a 5K, maybe a homemade brownie turns into a canned peaches or a contest entry at next year's bake off.

And eventually, you don't even mind those instances when you fall short, when you have a bad run or when you burn the biscotti. You accept yourself when you fall short and you accept others when they fall short, too. Because somewhere along the way, as you were working on improving your thing, your thing was improving you, too.

So, you're it. What's your thing?

Smores Splurge

With the left-over marshmallows from the rice krispie event (am I spelling that right?) and the found-chocolate in the cupboard (how does chocolate exist in my house without me knowing it) and the stale graham crackers in the pantry, we made smores yesterday at lunchtime. We even ate them before lunch. We're living on the wild side in this household. My excuse (and I've been using it a lot lately) is that, "It's summer. What the heck."

And with the 55 degree night we had and the low-humidity, low-80 degree days we're having, you bet it is.

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O.C. teen sells Zune Web site for $62,000"Hansup Yoon (pictured right), 15, has sold ZuneBoards, an Internet forum devoted to Microsoft’s Zune media player, for $62,000.The teen, who recently moved from Irvine to Fullerton, created the site months before Microsoft introduced its answer to Apple’s iPod in 2oo6."
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There was a time I could do a cartwheel without fearing what I might break...
A time I could eat pepperoni rolls without worrying what I might gain...
A time I could watch horror films without a pillow over my eyes...
and hands over my ears...
And there was a time when I could eat avocados without dying, nearly.

That's right, avocados nearly killed me.

It started about three years ago, right about the time I became pregnant with my little love. I was feasting on guacamole and extra salty tortilla chips and enjoying a perfectly perfect summer day.

In an hour, everything changed.

When I tell you I experienced the most violent stomach pain imaginable, believe me. There wasn't a single position that made it tolerable either...lying down, standing up, sitting down...all the same excruciating, stomach-on-fire pain. I had to talk myself out of dying, and thankfully, I was successful.

Of course, I didn't know it was the avocado right away. Afterall, who is allergic to avocado? After a few more experiences, it became evident that I was.

Well, I had another dance with death on Saturday. I had gotten a little arrogant and figured a bite or two of my husband's sushi was harmless, the avocado was no bigger than my pinky nail, how much harm could it do?

A lot. And it made up for lost time.

Turns out, the allergy isn't terribly common, but it isn't unheard of. Apparently, the oils from the avocado pit are the culprit...other people experience a similar sensation from onions and bananas, even.

Unfortunately, the latest experience did take causalities. Because the avocado was mixed with other foods, like sushi and vanilla flavored yogurt (formerly a staple in my diet), I will probably never ever be eating them again, either.

Tainted love.

How about you? Any foods you can't eat due to allergy or overdose or casualty of either?

Weekend Splurge
Still doing really great with the restricted spending. I've been able to cut my grocery bills pretty significantly by paying attention to sales and clipping coupons...and buying meat on sale and then freezing it. (I was never really good at that because the whole thawing thing never meshed with my planning or patience scale).

So the big splurge of the weekend will probably involve another shot at rice krispie treats that end up in our stomach and not underfoot...
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Hello from David & Sheri Burns at Long Lane Honey Bee Farms. We want to say a big hellow to all our fellow beekeepers and beekeepers soon-to-be!

Here at Long Lane Honey Bee Farms, we've been busy keeping up with rearing queens, building hives, processing honey and putting the final touches on our new store/learning center/bee-lab.









We've made great strides on our Illinois Queen Project. We produced so many great queens this year and sold many queens too. And by the way, now is a good time to requeen your hives. It is a little harder to have new queens accepted late in the year, but August and September queens will produce better brood going into winter, and will certainly help the hive to over winter. Do consider it! It is very important to requeen your hive once a year.




It has been a very productive summer for the bees. And our bees are still acting like it is July 11th instead of August 11th.



We are hopeful this is the case and that the bees will provide us with one more month of good, strong foraging here in Illinois.




I've had beekeepers call in and say something close to this: "I've got two hives and while one is doing great, the other one hasn't pulled out all the frames in their top deep yet. They just don't seem to be moving up at all. What's wrong and what should I do."

This is why I always encourage new beekeepers to start with 2 hives instead of one. Because if you start with just one, and it gets off to a slow start, then you have nothing to compare it to and nothing available to help it with.

During heavy nectar flows, your hive should look like this one in the video below. This is one of our hives working aster and other late summer flowers. This queen has done a great job at raising a huge amount of brood and that's why there are so many foragers now! A poor queen will have the entire hive down in number, which means less comb building, less bees, less nectar gather etc.



First, it is hard to say why one hive doesn't do as well as others. There could be many reasons. Generally, I point the finger at the colony's failure to maintain a strong queen. What I mean by that is that the hive may have supeceeded their queen or tried to swarm and made swarm cells and in the process the colony may have actually become queenless for a good part of the season. This does happen. In fact, in my opinion, queenlessness is actually a worse problem than mites! Maintaining a close eye on your queen and/or any queen cells is vitally important.

Between the months of April and June, you must inspect your hive every 14 days, making sure your queen is laying good and that there are no swarm or supercedure queen cells. During these critical build up months, you must maintain a good laying queen. Once I get into July and my nectar flow is at its peak, I seldom go back into the hive except to remove honey supers because I do not want to disturb the hive's passion to gather nectar for me. I stay out of my hive until the 2nd week in August and then I begin to prepare my hives for winter. August and especially September determines how well your bees will do in the spring of the next bee season.
So what is typical is that a hive will lose its queen, try to replace her, fail, try to replace her and fail again, and finally get the job done but considerable time has been wasted in the effort and after she starts laying, maybe they are not pleased with her performance and they replace her again. This can go on all summer. Other causes for slow build up might be that the queen was not mated well and is only able to lay an unacceptable brood pattern resulting in low bee population.

Beekeepers who choose not to monitor the queen and the brood pattern are taking a gamble and may find out much too late that the hive is not progressing well. When this happens, the first thing to do is to assess the queen and the amount of eggs and capped brood. Nearly solid sealed brood is what you want to see. Spotty brood means the queen needs replaced.

Okay, let's say that you need to get two deep brood boxes drawn and full before winter, and here it is in August and it doesn't look possible. What do you do? First, since this hive is weak, and you have another hive that is strong, swap locations during the middle of the day on a nice sunny day. By swapping the two hives, you actually are transferring the foraging bees from the strong hive into the weak hive because as they return to their home, it is actually now the hive of the weaker colony. Incoming nectar from a larger foraging team means more drawn comb too. Rember, it takes nectar to produce wax which is used to build comb.

Secondly, feed! Place an entrance feeder in the hive and feed 2:1 sugar water. If robbing is a problem, use a top feeder. We sell both top feeders and entrance feeders. Also, take two or three drawn frames with bees and move them up into the top deep and take the undrawn comb from the top deep down into the bottom deep. This will spark the bees to move up because some other bees are already up there.

If the weaker hive still does not seem to build up within the next month, say by the middle of September you should consider combining it with another hive. It is always better to go into winter with one strong hive rather than two weak hives.

If your plastic foundation is not drawn out yet, you might spray it with sugar water or you might need to melt some beeswax and recoat the plastic.

Visit our website at: www.honeybeesonline.com for a complete listing of our products and hives. Or give us a call at: 217-427-2678


Now, you've got to get rid of your mites!! This is the time of year that mites can be bad and spread viruses throughout your hive. A hive that enters winter with a mite infestation is likely to be doomed. So, our next lesson will give you some non-medicated ways to reduce your mite count greatly! Stay tuned.

Thanks for allowing us to share with you today, and please share these lessons with others. We are a family business, simple folks working hard to make a living. We're honest and sincere in helping you enjoy being a beekeeper. Help us out when you can and we will certainly appreciate it!!

If you have trouble reaching us by phone, please email us at david@honeybeesonline.com
David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms
www.honeybeesonline.com
217-427-2678

Remember to BEE-have yourself!
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Photo Courtesy of Rick Mandelson


I learned that there is a direct connection between your jaw and your hips.
To ease the tension from both, rest your tongue behind your two front teeth, soften your face.
Remember how that feels, and then try to do it often.

Or just look at this picture.

Splurgin' Sweet

Ava and I made Rice Krispie treats for my husband's work get-together. They had lots and lots of sprinkles ("there mommy, that's better" said Ava after emptying the entire jar into the crispy, marshmallowy, buttery mix).

We decided to go for a run while they cooled, because there's always room to fit in "one more thing." (I can hear my husband sighing).

That meant that we were running late, so after we got home everything was in rush-time. We cleaned up, cut them into squares, and arranged them on a Hello Kitty plate, which complemented the sprinkles nicely, I might add.

I quickly carried Ava, her shoes, her drinks, and who knows what else I grabbed along the way. Threw everything (except her) into the car, put the treats on top, and set Ava in her car seat. Watched her buckle herself in (because everything is, "I have to do it myself" these days). Shut the door, buckled in myself, thought for a second about where we were going, and left.

With the treats on top of the car.

When we got to the party, Ava said, "Mommy, forgot the treats!"

Oh yeah. The treats...

And then I remembered the last place I saw them. On top of the car.

When I went out to check, they were, of course, not there. No treats.

But when we drove home and turned onto our street, there they were, one with the pavement.

I spent the next 15 minutes scraping them up. Those darn sprinkles.

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Yesterday's NYT had an interesting piece on female suicide bombers. While many draw a straight link between religion and motivations for suicide bombings (yes, Sam Harris), the actual data is much more complicated. To add another layer, this article looks at the differences between motivations for male and female suicide bombers - but doesn't find any evidence of "uniquely feminine motivations driving women's attacks".

I have spent the last few years surveying all known female suicide attacks throughout the world since 1981 — incidents in Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, India, Lebanon, Pakistan, Russia, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Uzbekistan. In order to determine these women’s motives, I compared the data with a database of all known suicide attacks over that period compiled by the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism.

This research led to a clear conclusion: the main motives and circumstances that drive female suicide attackers are quite similar to those that drive men. Still, investigating the dynamics governing female attackers not only helps to correct common misperceptions but also reveals important characteristics about suicide terrorism in general.

To begin with, there is simply no one demographic profile for female attackers. From the unmarried communists who first adopted suicide terrorism to expel Israeli troops from Lebanon in the 1980s, to the so-called Black Widows of Chechnya who commit suicide attacks after the combat deaths of their husbands, to the longtime adherents of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam separatist movement in Sri Lanka, the biographies of female suicide attackers reveal a wide variety of personal experiences and ideologies.

And about the connection with Islamic fundamentalism:

Blaming Islamic fundamentalism is also wrongheaded. More than 85 percent of female suicide terrorists since 1981 committed their attacks on behalf of secular organizations; many grew up in Christian and Hindu families. Further, Islamist groups commonly discourage and only grudgingly accept female suicide attackers. At the start of the second intifada in 2000, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, claimed: “A woman martyr is problematic for Muslim society. A man who recruits a woman is breaking Islamic law.” Hamas actually rejected Darin Abu Eisheh, the second Palestinian female attacker, who carried out her 2002 bombing on behalf of the secular Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

And for their motivations (which are not different for male motivations):

For one, 95 percent of female suicide attacks occurred within the context of a military campaign against foreign occupying forces, suggesting that, at a macro level, the main strategic logic is to create or maintain territorial sovereignty for their ethnic group. Correspondingly, the primary individual motivation for both male and female suicide bombers is a deep loyalty to their communities combined with a variety of personal grievances against enemy forces.

Read the full article here.

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I have found no better primer on the current realities of starting a new technology company in a startup hub like Silicon Valley than Paul Graham's essays. Alas, they aren't published in a dead-tree medium yet, so I can't say something like "they are the essential reference on my bookcase..." but rest assured they would be.

A Fundraising Survival Guide
http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

Raising money has a mysterious capacity to suck up all your attention. Even if you only have one meeting a day with investors, somehow that one meeting will burn up your whole day. It costs not just the time of the actual meeting, but the time getting there and back, and the time preparing for it beforehand and thinking about it afterward.

What I tell most startups we fund is that if someone reputable offers you funding on reasonable terms, take it. There have been startups that ignored this advice and got away with it—startups that ignored a good offer in the hope of getting a better one, and actually did. But in the same position I'd give the same advice again. Who knows how many bullets were in the gun they were playing Russian roulette with?

The Hacker's Guide to Investors
http://www.paulgraham.com/guidetoinvestors.html

Whatever help investors give a startup tends to be underestimated. It's to everyone's advantage to let the world think the founders thought of everything. The goal of the investors is for the company to become valuable, and the company seems more valuable if it seems like all the good ideas came from within.

I say this as a founder: the contribution of founders is always overestimated. The danger here is that new founders, looking at existing founders, will think that they're supermen that one couldn't possibly equal oneself. Actually they have a hundred different types of support people just offscreen making the whole show possible.

How to Fund a Startup
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html

It's obvious why investors delay. Investing in startups is risky! When a company is only two months old, every day you wait gives you 1.7% more data about their trajectory. But the investor is already being compensated for that risk in the low price of the stock, so it is unfair to delay.

Fair or not, investors do it if you let them. Even VCs do it. And funding delays are a big distraction for founders, who ought to be working on their company, not worrying about investors. What's a startup to do? With both investors and acquirers, the only leverage you have is competition. If an investor knows you have other investors lined up, he'll be a lot more eager to close-- and not just because he'll worry about losing the deal, but because if other investors are interested, you must be worth investing in. It's the same with acquisitions. No one wants to buy you till someone else wants to buy you, and then everyone wants to buy you.

The key to closing deals is never to stop pursuing alternatives. When an investor says he wants to invest in you, or an acquirer says they want to buy you, don't believe it till you get the check. Your natural tendency when an investor says yes will be to relax and go back to writing code. Alas, you can't; you have to keep looking for more investors, if only to get this one to act.

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If you get a chance, please go and see the new Werner Herzog film, Encounters at the End of the World. Its about people who live and work at an Antarctica research base. This movie is a wonderful depiction of Herzog's eccentric and peculiar vision and it touches on everything from the origin of life, aliens, the future of humans on Earth to the human desire to know and test its limits of endurance. Even religion - at one point he amusingly makes a comparison of the preparation of underwater divers to priests preparing for Mass, and the frozen underwater landscape underneath to a cathedral. The people he interview are all fascinating. It is not a standard Antarctica documentary, and as Herzog himself puts it, its certainly not about any "fluffy penguins" (though a penguin does feature in the most memorable and haunting scene of the film). Please, go and see it. Here is a review by Roger Ebert and the trailer for the film below.

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Even if we grant for a moment that prayers work (hmm..no they really don't), would any self-respecting god really listen to this idiot's prayer? (hat tip Religion News Service)


More remarkably, he (Stuart Shepard of Focus on the Family) makes Governor of Georgia's prayer for rain last year, seem almost reasonable.
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This seems a bit odd to me. But here is a story about a study that claims that protection from infectious diseases may be the driving force behind religions (hat tip 3quarksdaily):

Dr Corey Fincher and Prof Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, come to this conclusion after studying why religions are far more numerous in the tropics compared with the temperate areas.

"Why does Cote d'Ivoire have 76 religions while Norway has 13, and why does Brazil have 159 religions while Canada has 15 even though in both comparisons the countries are similar in size?" they ask.

The reason is that religion helps to divide people and reduce the spread of diseases, which are more common the hotter the country, the research suggests.

Ok, I have to get hold of the published paper. Somewhere here there seems to be a causation/correalation problem, but I'll comment on it after seeing the paper. In the mean time, here is their prediction and test:

Any society that increased its coherence by adopting a religion, and dealt less with local groups with other beliefs as a result of cultural isolation, gained an advantage in being less likely to pick up diseases from its neighbours, and in the longer term to have a slightly different genetic makeup that may offer protective effects, for instance by making them less susceptible to a virus.

Equally, societies where infectious diseases are more common are less likely to migrate and disperse, not because of the effects of disease itself but as a behaviour that has evolved over time.

" If this argument is correct then, across the globe, religion diversity should correlate positively with infectious disease diversity," they say.

And the team finds evidence to back this.

"A sample of traditional societies shows that the range of those societies is lower in areas with more disease agents, compared with areas with few pathogens, and in countries religion diversity is positively related to two measures of stress caused by infection with parasites. Religion richness was positively related to disease richness (and significantly so)."

As predicted, "we found that religion diversity is the highest where disease diversity is also the highest and the lowest where disease diversity is also the lowest. To our knowledge, previous evolutionary models do not offer an explanation for why religion diversity varies spatially across the globe.

But what about other competing socio-poltical forces affecting the growth of religious groups? Or non-religious factors leading to the segmentation of the population? I will get a copy of the paper and get on this.

Read the full story here. And of course, for more on origin of religions, check out David Sloan Wilson, as part of our Science & Religion lecture series at Hampshire College.

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