September is National Honey Month, which has had us thinking about an unsung hero of our fall viewscape—the common goldenrod. Often mistakenly accused of causing relentless fits of hay fever in humans (ragweed is the real culprit there!), goldenrod and other late-blooming plants burnishing large swathes of the North American landscape at this time of year are known to provide to the honeybees of our local food system a major source of pollen. And particularly notable this year: Following an extraordinarily dry summer in many parts of New York and other states, the goldenrod of fall has become especially important to colony survival in the long winter months ahead. For honeybees and the beekeepers who nurture them in the drought-stricken parts of the American Northeast, the goldenrod bloom that has finally set in after the long-awaited late summer rains signify a vital last chance to play some serious catch up after a very long stretch of slim pickings.
For this month’s Vaults of Mann feature, we celebrate this key relationship by drawing from both the botanical and the apicultural sections of Mann’s rare book collection. Featured in our Tumblr post for September are images from a splendid late 19th century British gardening guide, Favourite Flowers of Garden and Greenhouse (1896)by Edward Step and William Watson and from an American beekeeping classic, L.C. Root’s Quinby’s New Beekeeping of 1879. If for Step and Watson goldenrod is an easy if “coarse” and space-hogging garden plant, suitable really only for the cottage garden or shrubbery, for astute practical beekeeper the likes of Lyman Root, it is a bit of a star, providing “valuable forage” that helps bees replenish combs depleted by summer honey harvests, or, in the case of wild bee colonies, by the food requirements of an active and growing colony.
While the goldenrod may have yet to shake its reputation as an unruly intruder to the finely cultivated garden, among beekeepers and other advocates for pollinators of today it continues to earn a high rank among top plants to nurture for the sake of healthy pollinator populations. As this under-rated, genetically diverse fall flower proves itself this year to be a kind of famine food for the honeybee populations in New York State and other drought-stricken regions of the United States, we’re reminded again of the resilience that’s supported by a botanically and biologically varied landscape–a lesson no doubt well worth taking to heart in a changing global climate.
In addition to enjoying our online Vaults feature for the month, please be sure to stop by the Library to browse through the fall book display we’ve prepared in conjunction with this spotlight on the symbiosis found between bees and the plant world around us. For the month of honey, it’s a relationship worth celebrating!
Select titles from the book display:
100 Plants to Save the Bees: Provide and Protect the Blooms That Pollinators Need to Survive and Thrive. North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 2016.
Biggle, Jacob. Biggle Bee Book: A Swarm of Facts On Practical Bee-Keeping, Carefully Hived. Philadelphia: W. Atkinson co., 1909.The Queen Must Die
Blaylock, Iris T., and Terresa H Richards. Honey Bees: Colony Collapse Disorder and Pollinator Role In Ecosystems. New York: Nova Science, 2009.
Davis, Ivor, and Roger Cullum-Kenyon. The BBKA Guide to Beekeeping. Second edition. London, UK: Bloomsbury Natural History, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2015.
Dowden, Anne Ophelia, The Clover and the Bee: A Book of Pollination. New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1990.
Droege, Sam, and Laurence Packer. Bees: An Up-Close Look At Pollinators Around the World. Minneapolis, MN: Voyageur Press, an imprint of Quarto Publishing Group, 2015.
Green, Rick. Apis Mellifera: A.k.a. Honeybee. Boston: Branden Books, 2002.
Holm, Heather, Pollinators of Native Plants: Attract, Observe and Identify Pollinators and Beneficial Insects with Native Plants. Minnetonka, MN: Pollination Press LLC, 2014.
Ilona., and Ed Readicker-Henderson. A Short History of the Honey Bee: Humans, Flowers, and Bees In the Eternal Chase for Honey. Portland: Timber Press, 2009.
Kirk, William D. J., and F. N Howes. Plants for Bees: A Guide to the Plants That Benefit the Bees of the British Isles. Cardiff: International Bee Research Association, 2012.
Lee-Mäder, Eric, Attracting Native Pollinators: Protecting North America’s Bees and Butterflies : the Xerces Society Guide. North Adams, MA: Storey Pub., 2011.
Lovell, John Harvey, The Flower and the Bee: Plant Life and Pollination. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1918.
Pundyk, Grace., and Grace Pundyk. The Honey Trail: In Pursuit of Liquid Gold and Vanishing Bees. 1st U.S. ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010.
Richards, A. J. The Pollination of Flowers by Insects. London: Academic Press for the Linnean Society of London, 1978.
Robinson, Richard Knox, The Beekeepers. New York: Cinema Guild, 2009. [DVD]
Rosenbaum, Stephanie. Honey: From Flower to Table. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002.
Shepherd, Matthew., and Edward S Ross. Pollinator Conservation Handbook. Portland, Or.: Xerces Society in association with Bee Works, 2003.
Stevens, Ken. Alphabetical Guide for Beekeepers. Mytholmroyd, Hebden Bridge: Northern Bee Books, 2012.
Sarah Kennedy ’10 started at Mann in July as the Collection Development & Digital Collections Librarian. She coordinates the library’s book selection process (both print and electronic) and serves as the coordinator for liaison services to the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station community in Geneva, NY. Sarah is also the liaison to two departments (Entomology and Food Science). Sarah comes to us from the University of West Virginia, where she was the Agriculture, Natural Resources, Design, and Extension Librarian. Sarah’s net id is sek45.
Kate Ghezzi-Kopel is the Applied Health Sciences Librarian at Albert R. Mann Library. She serves as liaison to the Cornell department of Human Development and the Division of Nutritional Sciences. Kate holds a B.A. in English from Ithaca College and a M.S. in Library and Information Sciences from Syracuse University. Her interests include health information literacy, systematic reviews, social media in libraries, and promotion of evidence-based research practices. Prior to joining Mann Library, Kate was Research Assistant at The Center for Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University and Intern at the SUNY Upstate Health Sciences Library. She also spent several years in academic publishing developing and acquiring content in the fields of biology, communication studies, mathematics, and clinical medicine. Kate’s net id is kwg37.
Mary Lee “Mel” Jensen was hired as a part-time reference assistant at Mann Library. She has experience as the Head of Instructional Services and as an Assistant Professor at Kent State University. She was also the Instruction Coordinator at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, Ohio. Mel will be working the front lines as a reference assistant where she will help manage reference desk operations, and help triage and answer the thousands of annual questions we get at the reference desk. Her hours will be 8:15am – 1:15pm, Monday through Friday. Mel’s NetID is mj533.
Megan Benson started as another new part-time reference assistant In July. Before coming to Mann, Megan worked in the Orange County Library System in Orlando Florida, and as an Adjunct Professor at Valencia College in Orlando. Megan will also be helping to manage reference desk operations, and helping to triage and answer our volumes of reference questions. Her hours will be 12:00 – 5:00pm, Monday through Friday. Megan’s NetID is mlb459.
Deborah Cooper joined Mann’s Collection Development department as our new Collections Specialist on September 29th. Deborah comes to us from Digital Scholarship and Preservation Services (DSPS) in Olin where she has worked on the arXiv repository team. Previously she worked at the SUNY Cortland Memorial Library where she had reference and collection development duties. She also has Special Collections experience from an internship at the Rakow Library at the Corning Museum of Glass and has done volunteer archival work for Historic Ithaca. Deborah earned an MLIS from San José State University and has a BA in History from Leeds University, U.K. Her net id is dsc255.
This coming spring semester, Mann librarian Sarah J. Wright will again collaborate with the Office of Undergraduate Biology to offer BIOG 3020: Seminar in Research Skills for Life Sciences.
It’s Cornell winter break and the campus is settling into some deep winter quiet. Too quiet for you? Wondering how you might be able to fill your time until the start of the spring semester? Please allow us to name you a few ways Mann can help you with that:
Picture this: You’re working on a systematic review or literature search and you’ve come up with 1,000+ citations. Great! But now what? It takes time to read and select relevant articles, coordinate decision making with your collaborators, and organize your results. When you’re doing a review, this article-screening process can quickly become a daunting task.
As any good researcher knows, there’s no magic wand for getting good research done. But there are some pretty helpful tools out there, and one of the most promising that we think you should know about is PowerNotes, a new desktop application that can make online research much more organized and efficient. PowerNotes is presently free for all Cornellians with a “cornell.edu” email address.
For over two decades, Mann Library’s online collection of free and open-access geospatial data for New York State—known as CUGIR, or, the Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository—has served analysts, policy makers and citizen scientists across New York and the world. A recent CUGIR redesign has made finding and downloading geospatial data from the site ever easier. Also new and particularly important for GIS-focused scholarship at Cornell and beyond: CUGIR is now designed to accept geospatial data gathered by Cornell researchers doing work not just in New York State but anywhere in the world.