At his Worm Power facility 100 miles northwest of Ithaca in Avon, N.Y. Tom Herlihy feeds 20 tons of dairy cow manure to eight million earthworms each week. About 28 days after they are fed, the worms churn out “vermicompost” – a nutrient-rich organic fertilizer.  Allison Jack grad, plant pathology and plant-microbe biology, has shown that vermicompost can suppress disease in crop plants.

This is a follow-up to a sun article that ran on Sept. 8, entitled, “The Mysterious Collapse of the American Honeybee.” It’s based on a story reported in the NY Times.

Each year for the past four years, 20 to 40 percent of US honeybee colonies simply disappeared – a phenomenon that became known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). In a major breakthrough, Army scientists in Maryland and bee entomologists in Montana jointly discovered a perfect correlation between diseased colonies and the presence of a virus and the fungus, Nosema ceranae.

Surely honey, a sweet, golden, and delightfully sticky treat, is harmless?  After all, Winnie the Pooh salivated over it, ancient Egyptians embalmed their dead with it and Romans paid their taxes with it. In actuality, venom from honey producers, Apis mellifera, is toxic. Bee venom, known as apitoxin, can be deadly to  predators and to the one to two percent of the human population.

Cannibalistic, predatory and voracious: three words about spiders are enough to make anyone suffer from arachnophobia.  Cornell’s resident “spider lady”, Prof. Linda Rayor, entomology, actually finds them quite lovable.  She considers herself an “arachnophile” - or spider lover.

Four years ago, a commercial beekeeper, who had trucked thousands of his honeybee colonies to winter in Florida, discovered that all the bees had disappeared. There were no skeletons, so to speak. The bees were just gone. Given the importance of bees in the pollination of apple trees, the local apple industry must confront this new mystery.

Across the southern United States, a predator hides among the cacti.