Bailey - Cuffy ... Bees, part 1 - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Bees.  Without them our food supply will collapse.  If all you think they produce is honey, think again.

Today starts the first of two blog posts, letting our mischievous bear cub, Cuffy, introduce the topic of bees.  Arthur Scott Bailey has a larger bit of nature to discuss and took four brief chapters to do it.  Today we'll look at half of it since they are small. . . not as small as a bee, but small.  I'll also afterwards add an even briefer and unusual personal story of interaction with a bee.

 

We interrupt this story for a brief commercial message.  While we may all appreciate honey, that's not the only reason bees are important.  Without bees our food supply and agriculture collapse.  They pollinate fruits and vegetables, otherwise harvests won't happen.  Here's a link to a July 2017 article showing "There's now very strong evidence we really are killing our bees" with neonicotinoid pesticides and why it's important.  The periodical, Science, also shows the results of the two international studies.

Next week I plan to see where the rest of Cuffy's adventure takes him.  Fortunately last week we saw how he learned to swim.

I also promised an unusual adventure of my own with bees.  It all began at a donut shop.  We were heading out early and it was decided to get some donuts.  I was in the back seat of the van.  It was hot enough that the windows were open as we drove along, munching on our donuts.  Plop!  I reached down for the crumb that had dropped in my lap and bit it.  Something wasn't right.  I spit it out only to look at what must surely have been a very startled bee!  Quick as a reflex I tossed it out the window.  Only later did I think I'm probably the only human to bite a bee and not be bitten in return.  PHEW!

In compensation and appreciation of that bee, I want to point out that petitions to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the manufacturers of pesticides exist.  Search using the terms "bees pesticide petition".  You can start with Change.org's -- their organization also offers ways to create your own petitions -- and/or try CredoAction's petitions.

Thank you for your sweet action before it's too late.
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This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

 

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ and put in http://www.story-lovers.com/ in the search box.  I recommend using the latest "snapshot" on November 2016

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 

   

You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  For an example of using the "Wayback Machine", list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!)  is gone, but using the Wayback Machine you can still see it.  At the Wayback Machine I put in his site's address, then chose 2006 since it was a later year and clicked until I reached the Library at

You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  For an example of using the "Wayback Machine", list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is gone, but using the Wayback Machine you can still see it.  At the Wayback Machine I put in his site's address, then chose 2006 since it was a later year and clicked until I reached the Library at http://www.pjtss.net/library/.  
Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!