Bald-faced hornets, vireos and me
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
While attention was focused last week on President Donald Trump’s move to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, his administration was moving to sabotage another, much-larger Obama-era achievement: the Affordable Care Act.
The Department of Health and Human Services is cutting the budget for outreach programs intended to help Americans sign up for health insurance coverage in 2018. In addition, HHS has cut the sign-up period that begins Nov. 1 from 90 to 45 days.
And let’s not forget the U.S. Senate, where Republicans are discussing a last-ditch effort to replace Obamacare before Oct. 1, when the 60-vote cloture rule goes back into effect. A bill by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S. C., and Bill Cassidy, R- La., would send block grants to state governments, which would decide how to take care of the uninsured.
The Trump actions mean that fewer Americans will sign up for coverage. Those who do will tend to be sicker and thus more alert to the need for insurance. Younger, healthier Americans won’t bother, or won’t hear about the program, meaning more insurers are likely to lose money in 2018 and bail out of the program in 2019.
Trump continues to threaten cost-sharing subsidies to insurance companies, which keep coverage affordable for some 7 million low-income Americans. The Congressional Budget Office says eliminating them would drive up premiums by 20 percent and add $194 billion to the deficit over 10 years.
Cutting the outreach budget is likely to have a similar effect. Millions of people will rejoin the ranks of the uninsured as insurers pull out of markets where they can’t make a profit. Many insurers already have taken that step, pulling out of low-population rural counties — counties that voted heavily for Trump.
Since its inception, the ACA has recruited customers to HealthCare.gov in two ways: By heavy TV advertising during 90-day sign-up times and by paying social service organizations to help people navigate the complicated process of signing up. Last week HHS announced it would cut the $100 million advertising budget to $10 million.
The budget for navigator programs has been cut by 41 percent, from $62.5 million to $36 million.
HHS justified the cuts by saying Americans already were aware of the ACA program, though polls show at least a third of the population knows nothing about it.
Like the DACA action, the sneak attack on the ACA is cruel, cowardly and ultimately costlier to taxpayers. Social service, civic and church groups must pick up the slack by helping those who need insurance sign up for it. From the Los Angeles Times
Never mind what President Donald Trump said on the campaign trail. His administration and GOP leaders appear determined to eliminate protections for medical marijuana growers, sellers and users.
Every year since 2014, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., has inserted an amendment into a federal spending bill to prevent the Justice Department from prosecuting medical marijuana businesses that comply with their state’s laws. It’s been a temporary but necessary fix to address a fundamental contradiction: that even though 26 states have legalized medical marijuana, the drug is still prohibited under federal law.
The amendment, most recently co- sponsored by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D- Ore., has provided some measure of security and stability to responsible medical marijuana suppliers by assuring that they won’t be raided or prosecuted by federal authorities.
But last week, the House Rules Committee killed the amendment at the urging of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a marijuana prohibitionist.
Sessions sent a letter to members of Congress in May citing “an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime” and urging them to reject the amendment. He wrote that the Justice Department needs to have free rein to use “all laws available” to enforce the Controlled Substances Act, a woefully out-of-date law that says marijuana is as addictive as heroin and has no medical value. Of course, that’s baloney. In fact, 46 states have authorized cannabis for medical use, including controlling seizures in children. Even Trump, prior to his election, recognized the value of medical marijuana, telling a rally in Nevada, “I know people that are very, very sick and for whatever reason the marijuana really helps them.” Nevertheless, the federal government continues to insist that marijuana products should be illegal even for medicinal use, putting its producers and users at risk of criminal enforcement.
Frankly, the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer amendment should be noncontroversial given the overwhelming public support — in excess of 80 percent, according to several polls — for medical use of marijuana.
The Senate approved a comparable amendment in July. But if the two houses can’t agree and the language doesn’t make it into the final bill, the protections for medical marijuana will expire in early December.
This would be a huge step backwards in the movement to liberalize marijuana laws. For years states have taken the lead. Many now allow medical marijuana and some even permit recreational marijuana for adults. One argument is that since marijuana is already so widely used, it would be better for public health and safety to create a legal, regulated and controlled market. But even as marijuana laws have changed at the state level, the drug has remained illegal under federal law, sending a mixed message and causing uncertainty.
Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican who is among the most outspoken advocates for liberalizing drug laws, wants to eliminate at least some of that uncertainty.
In addition to his annual amendment, he introduced the Respect State Marijuana Laws Act of 2017, which would protect individuals from federal prosecution if they are adhering to state cannabis laws, whether for medicinal or recreational use. The bill has a couple of dozen co-sponsors, mostly from the bipartisan Cannabis Caucus, which focuses on legalization and regulation issues. But the bill still faces a steep climb in Congress. Congressional leaders cannot continue to bury their heads in the sand. Decades of experience have shown that the U.S. can’t win a war on marijuana.
Moreover, waging such a war now would hurt the millions of people who rely on medical cannabis for relief and would overrule the majorities who have supported medical and recreational use.
It seems inevitable that the federal government will follow the states’ lead sooner or later. Despite Trump’s campaign comments, his administration shows no sign of adopting a more pragmatic approach to marijuana policy. It’s up to Congress to show leadership.
Ifound a bald- faced hornets’ nest on the front porch of our cabin in May 2014. It was only about the size of a baseball and I only saw one hornet perched on the outside of it. The hornets inside weren’t spooked and ignored me. I guess they didn’t consider me a threat. They should have.
In 2015 I discovered a large hornets’ nest under an eave of our house in Carrollton. I killed this colony, too, and destroyed the nest.
About two months ago my wife showed me a large nest in a camellia near our garage door. I let those hornets live, and now the nest is about the size of a five gallon Home Depot bucket. We and the hornets are now living in a state of watchful peace. I enjoy the sight of the telltale gray paper of the nest and the hornets’ striking black and white bodies.
A colony of bald-faced hornets starts out in the spring with one lone individual, the queen. She will have mated the previous fall and then crawled underground or to some other sheltered place to hibernate. When she comes out of her hiding place she shivers to bring her muscle temperature above 95 degrees, and then flies off to find food — she hasn’t eaten for at least six months.
She will feed on nectar from flowers and sap from sapsucker licks. Later she will be confined to the nest and will feed only on sugary secretions regurgitated by her grubs.
After she eats, the young queen becomes attracted to weathered dry wood, and with her mandibles working from side to side, she scrapes off fibers, mixes them with her saliva, and presto she has a glob of liquid paper pulp. This she applies to the underside of a tree limb, twig or some other structure to fashion a short stiff rod. Hauling in load after load of pulp, she flares the rod out to the sides and adds a battery of hexagonal cells much like the cups honeybees make out of wax. She then makes paper envelopes around her nursery and while releasing a little sperm that she stored from her fall mating, she deposits an egg into each hexagonal cup.
Each fertilized egg hatches into a white grub that is genetically female but most likely will remain a sterile “worker.”
To the queen hornet, time and temperature are inextricably linked. She is programmed to behave in ways that shorten the development time of her offspring so that she can raise several hundred of them during the one summer allotted for her life. If the nest cools, the eggs STANLEY TATE Mike Lester, Washington Post Writers Group stop developing and the young stop growing. She needs to keep her baby factory going to raise lots of workers during the summer. Her first batches of workers are slaves that promote her objective of raising many reproducing offspring in late summer and fall. The sterile workers cooperate because their evolutionary “objective” is to help raise brothers and sisters who will insert the same genes they have into the next generation. Meanwhile, the colony as a whole is in competition with other colonies for resources to fuel its economy.
My interest in hornets and their nests is new and intense and right now it is probably matched only by that of a bird, the red- eyed vireo. The vireo uses paper from hornets’ nests in the construction of its own nests.
Given what hornets can do, I think this bird has a strange taste in nesting material. Hornet paper is hard to come by.
You can search for a hornets’ nest for many days and not find one, even in winter when such a nest is conspicuous from as much as a hundred feet away. It must be a burden for a vireo to find this material in the summer when old nests are not only rare but also nearly invisible and when the new nests are vigorously defended. There must be an advantage to using the hornet paper that offsets the costs of getting it. I wonder if the hornet paper, which might serve as a decoration for the bird, might ultimately serve as a prop that fools potential predators into avoiding the nest.
When vireos build their nests in May the hornets’ nests are still small — about the size of a vireo nest.
From a distance, from underneath, both look like gray blobs hanging from twigs. Might a crow, blue jay, chipmunk, or squirrel confuse one with the other?
If these predators have experienced a hornets’ nest defense before, then a mere glimpse of hornet paper on a shape that looks like a hornets’ nest may be sufficient to keep them from making a closer inspection. It is also possible that the paper on the vireo’s nest no longer serves a useful purpose and is more like our appendix, just there.