Articles
B&B Highway
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Quick Read: What Is A Cockatube?
Black Cockatoos are unique, very social birds that have loud and distinctive calls. In Australia, there are five species of black cockatoos - the Carnaby’s, Baudin’s, glossy black, red-tailed and yellow-tailed. Many of these species and subspecies are threatened to some degree, facing different threats and challenges, such as ongoing and extensive breeding and foraging habitat loss and degradation due to vegetation clearing, hampered by the bushfires that swept across several states in Australia during the summer of 2019-2020. The good news is that there has been considerable effort by organisations and individuals to reverse this situation. Landcare Serpentine-Jarrahdale, in…
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A Reminder To Celebrate Sustainably
We know the better part of the last two year has been hard for so many people and when everything around you leaves you heady with a festive anticipation it’s difficult not to get carried away. Eat, drink, be merry, and shop til’ you drop seems to be the theme of the season. But whether you are ready for a white Christmas or are all set to celebrate it by the beach, make sure to keep it green as well. Have an eco-conscious yuletide and celebrate without making the Earth suffer. In case you are finding yourself at a loss…
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Good COP, Bad COP
While we at PlantingSeeds focus on local efforts to help biodiversity, we are motivated by the big picture as well. In case you missed the news about COP and biodiversity (yes, the COP UN Glasgow conference wasn’t just about climate change), here are some challenging facts and developments: Which is what we, through the B&B Highway, are trying to do to help biodiversity in our own way. Report from The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
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From Our ArcHIVES - Part 3: Taking The Sting Out Of Bees - Fun Facts About Stingless Bees
Our third instalment of delving into cognition and other cool facts about highly social insects. The grand finale of our trilogy is the stingless bee group. This is the least studied group out of other highly social bees (bumblebees and honeybees). However this does not make them any less interesting as these bees are full of secrets and mysterious behaviours that are yet to be understood. As a brief introduction stingless bees are found all across the tropics and subtropics of the world and include 600 species, 11 of them in Australia (Gruter, 2020). Contrarily to their highly popular cousins,…
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From Our ArcHIVES - Part 2: Fumbling Our Way Through Some Bumblebee Facts
This is our second instalment that delves into cognition and other cool areas concerning social insects. Find the first part of our series here. Just like honeybees, bumblebees also show impressive learning abilities and are very talented little insects. In this second feature of our series, we showcase the bumble bee and its extraordinary capabilities to show emotions, learn and solve complex tasks and trick plants into flowering early! Forget me not! How bees remember and learn about flowers Finding out how bees learn and remember reminds us of how intelligence takes many forms and how cognition in other species…
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Pollinator Policy: Casting Our Net Across The World And Australia
Pollinators are Earth’s little champions. Bees, birds, butterflies and other pollinators are key to the reproductive success of 75% of flowering plants around the world. They are integral to ecosystems, soil and water health. They ensure global crop productivity and nutritional security. And yet, we know pollinators are in trouble and their numbers are declining because of habitat loss, changes in land use, pesticides and climate change. We, at PlantingSeeds Projects, are helping pollinators through our urban and regional regenerative B&B Highway initiative. By planting native and endemic flora, installing habitats such as stingless beehives and bird houses and offering…