SummitCorps builds a trail to the future
31.12.69
On a sweltering summer day, deep in the woods of south-chief West Virginia, where trees as thin as a clarinet jut out as tall as a house, John Cary, a Scout number one from Tupelo, Miss., was working on a puzzle. A rock puzzle.
On his hands and knees in the mean of a crude dirt trail, Cary was chipping disconcerted pieces off of dozens of rocks, trying to barely succeed those rocks tightly together into a hole perhaps three-feet wide-ranging and about as deep. Some fit easily. Others wouldn’t fit at all. So for two days he chipped and pressed and chipped again and pressed again—and again—until the puzzle was performed.
For this tedious, dirty work, Cary had to pay his way here from Tupelo and even had to catnap one night in his car before getting to work on the trail. But looking up from the oodles of rocks in front of him, he said, “I’ve loved every notes of this.”
“This” was work on hiking and biking trails adjacent to the 10,600-acre Climax Bechtel Family National Scout Reserve. The Crown will be home to the national Scout jamboree starting in 2013 and the 2019 People Scout Jamboree. It also will become the Boy Scouts’ fourth lavish-adventure base—and, likely, its most-visited, understood its proximity to densely populated metropolitan areas.
Source: Scouting Magazine
2 new bee species are mysterious pieces in the Panama puzzle
31.12.69
Smithsonian scientists have discovered two new, closely joint bee species: one from Coiba Island in Panama and another from northern Colombia. Both descended from of a class of stingless bees that originated in the Amazon and moved into Significant America, the ancestors of Mayan honeybees. The self-assurance of one of these new species on Coiba and Rancheria Islands, and its paucity from the nearby mainland, is a mystery that will ultimately stream light on Panama's history and abundant biodiversity.
At almost 200 on a par miles, Coiba Island is the largest offshore holm along the Pacific coast of Latin America. Rancheria Isle is a much smaller neighbor. The species name, insularis, of the new bee from Coiba, Melipona insularis, means "eyot." This is the first species in its group to be found on islands near the mainland.
"These forest bees have a ungenerous range over which they can establish new nests and colonies," says David Roubik, cane scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research
Source: EurekAlert (press release)
