Phil Lester

I bought this book back when it first released, but I never finished it. I kind of lost interest in Dan and Phil a couple of days after I bought the book, so I shoved it to the back of my dresser. I found it the other night and decided to reread and finish it this time. It was a good book, and they're both lovely writers, but since I don't pay much attention to them anymore, I had a hard time getting into it. I think I would have loved this book had I still been interested in them.

The book was funny, but you can tell they wrote it before their content change. I felt nostalgic while reading it. It caused me to remember just how chaotic they used to be (they still are, honestly). Reading it felt like I was watching one of their videos, especially during the back and forth parts.… (lisätietoja)

New Zealand has too many bees.
This seems a strange thing to say, with protestors worldwide demanding we "Save the Bees". After all, if all the bees died, wouldn't humanity shortly follow? (No, we wouldn't, but tomatoes and almonds would be a lot more expensive. Honeybees and bumblebees are needed for some crops, but in New Zealand about half our pollination is done by moths, flies, and native bees.)
There was no honey in Aotearoa until the first hives arrived in 1839. Since then the honeybee (/Apis mellifera/), like other European imports, has multiplied enormously. Bees are by far our most numerous livestock. There are now nearly a million hives in New Zealand, each holds around 40,000 bees in summer, and those 40 billion bees outnumber all the cows, sheep, pigs, people, dogs, cats, and every other introduced mammal put together. Plus the chickens. Forty billion honeybees is a lot: there are only 100 billion in the entire USA. Our national bee herd has grown 200% since 2008.
Why do we have so many bees? We got by just fine for years with far fewer, and the two main things that bees make – honey and wax – are these days almost useless. Sometimes it seems as if jars of honey exist only to be gifted, like the giant stone coins of Yap. Honey does have some medicinal properties, especially if made from mānuka nectar, but honey is very much like Savlon: it only works when smeared on skin bacteria and not – this, really, is the critical point – if you eat it.
[Full review forthcoming in Reading Room]… (lisätietoja)