Save The Bees!

Hey Everyone!

Every Morning the first thing I do on my computer is check Yahoo! News. This morning I found some really interesting videos. The bees are slowly dying! A beehive owner found his beehives to be abandoned one day, no bees in sight, not even dead ones! Apparently it’s because of a relatively new nicotine based insecticide that slows the immune system of insects including cute, little bumblebees. Yes they can give quite a sting, but amazingly their venom is actually good for you. It strengthens your immune system… unless of course you are allergic then… well the bees aren’t good news for you :-P.

Lots of fruits rely on bees (wow, this sounds like one of those boring things that you have to read and then answer questions about in school, urgh!)… for instance blueberries because of their difficult to get into urn shaped flowers, they are very hard to populate.

Now what was the shape of the blueberry flower? Yes, that’s correct an URN shape. Well done! No I’m only joking, I’ll carry on with some (slightly) more interesting… stories now :-P.

On our last few days staying in Palermo, we looked around at a few houses… these didn’t interest us much… well the one was absolutely lovely … but the guy who wanted to rent it would only be ready in six months time! So this wouldn’t really work for us…

So we went into an internet café, since we were staying in a bed and breakfast by this stage and they didn’t have an open access to internet options. We were looking for another B&B and “something” just seemed to take my sisters fancy to the west of the country, on an interactive map. We clicked on it and it brought up a list of B&B’s.

We found one that took our liking. On the website it said he could speak Italian, English (Woo Hoo!) and Spanish… we called him up and yes he could speak English… later we found out that he just put Spanish on for the sake of it and that he couldn’t really speak that. But it didn’t matter because he spoke English :-P!

Now the question was how where we going to get there. It was quite far down and we didn’t have a car yet. So we just took a long trip on a… long trip bus, stopping at a hotel for the night before we were booked into (Okay I’m going to give him a fake name, because personally, he doesn’t know I’m writing this and if he ever googles himself, like we know we all do, come on admit it, then that won’t be so great) Giovanni’s place (Italian enough name there :-P).

The bus was supposed to drop us off, close enough to the hotel but we accidentally got off too early thinking that it had stopped for good and then off it went again we were like (:-O! So my dad and I went to find a taxi… later to find out that, what are the odds, this town only has one or two! Soon we found one; he was an old-ish guy sleeping in the front of his car. The newsagent man that told us that he was the taxi guy, yelled across the street and woke him up :-P. Then off we went to our hotel, phew!

Oh actually the first time we ever took the bus in Sicily we were kicked off it! Not because we were naughty or anything… mainly because we didn’t know we had to STAMP the ticket in the ticket machine. How mean of them! No-one actually does unless the inspector comes on the bus, because if you don’t you can just use it for a different bus journey.

Yes, so to carry on with what I was saying, we took the bus, stayed in a hotel for the night called Villa Favourita. It was really cool, instead of a big building with rooms… you had your own detached IGLOO! Yes an igloo… or close enough to one anyway. It was a giant white dome shaped thing… tonnes of them just plopped down in an open area with orange and lemon trees growing around, on the sides of the paths… Venetia and I also recorded there as well… we were just messing around though… no real footage :-P.

There was this thing on top of the netted football section by our igloo and we thought it was a slice of toast… don’t ask us how it got there it just did! So we tried to get it down by throwing our ball up and whacking it (how old are we :-P)… it just kept “rolling” back to the middle of the net though, in the end we realised that it was a just a stone… PRETENDING to be a slice of toast! It was so funny!

The next morning we were up nice and early, it wasn’t the best of days but it was nice enough. We had arranged for “Giovanni” to come pick us up from the hotel to take us to his place.

He arrived looking like any Sicilian does at this time of year. In an abnormally large black jacket and sunglasses. We packed up our suitcases and he took us to his place. Once we arrived he brought us upstairs, showed us our rooms then he dragged my dad downstairs and took him shopping for a barbeque that he wanted to have with us…

The one good thing that we learnt from Giovanni was that lemon juice on a sausage is… AMAZING! It has to be the nicest way to eat barbequed meat! Seriously you have to try it!

Giovanni was …. quite a character. He took us fishing once… it only lasted about 15 minutes… the worm that was destined to the hook BIT him as a desperate, final move! It was an evil looking thing (the worm was too :-P). No really. The worm looked like something out of the movie Men in Black, it’s whole mouth opened wide and a new… I don’t know what you’d call it… a tongue maybe with incisors on it… it was really nasty…! They are sea worms. We’d gotten so many in the box and because of the fact that we had only fished for 15 minutes, we still had all of those biting worms. So Giovanni threw them all into the water and off they swam or stuck to a piece of seaweed.. they were really weird!

Right, well I’ll leave it at that, don’t want to freak you out too much. See I eventually got back around to fishing!

Hope to hear from you soon.

- Bianca