Micro-ecologies

So we're probably all familiar with the idea of micro-climates, where my east-facing hillside near the lake may have an appreciably different climate from your your south-facing slope a half mile inland from the lake. Well, what about micro-ecologies? As I've written before, I haven't seen more than a stray pair of honeybees around my house in a number of years. We used to get them in the raspberries every year, but no longer. It's mostly just bumblebees now. I've attributed their disappearance to the two big die-offs of honeybees in the past decade. However, I just now spotted a flowering hedge at 42nd and 11th here in the U District that was full of honeybees. Now I'm wondering whether there was a hive in the old cherry tree across the alley from us, and whether the honeybees disappeared when the cherry tree was cut down to make way for townhouses.

So now I'm curious whether any Seattlites reading this have seen honeybees in their neighborhoods. (I know that akirlu and libertango see them at their place in Kent.)

Micronesia in the news, or How useful it is to be useless!

So Palau (widely called Belau in Micronesia) has agreed to take the 17 Uighurs from Gitmo in exchange for $200 million. The part of the story that is striking to me is that apparently nobody else has been willing to take the Uighurs, because the PRC wants them back and has been pressuring other countries not to take them. Why was Palau willing to buck the PRC? Because they don't recognize the PRC. Palau recognizes Taiwan instead. Why? Because Taiwan has invested money in Palau (and elsewhere in Micronesia, including Yap to some extent).

This is like the other shoe dropping to me, because my brother and I have often wondered why Taiwan paid so much attention (and so much money) to Micronesia. The answer would seem to be because Taiwan needs allies wherever it can find them, and the Micronesian nations are unimportant enough that the PRC has ignored them up till now. And so Palau is able to solve one of Obama's big Gitmo headaches. Never saw that coming!

Just as a side note, Japan invests in Micronesia too, but they have a historical colonial relationship with the islands that seems to account for it. Well, that and it's a source of high-grade tuna.