September 2021

Haverford Bee Handbook
Features Science in Society

Haverford Bee Handbook

Emi Krishnamurthy

Which bees should I be afraid of? What should I do if a wasp lands on my sandwich? Did I just see a murder hornet? This is your guide to the bees on Haverford’s campus.

Bees run the world. They are widely recognized as being integral to biodiversity and food security. Their little lives impact our water cycle, carbon cycle, GDP, architecture, and so much more. Interior of the Vessel in Hudson Yards, NYC (left), honeycomb (right). Photos by Soly Moses and Archana GS. Honeybees First and foremost, the honeybee is an excellent pollinator, skilled honey maker, and close friend to Haverford’s campus. Our own beehive hosts thousands of fuzzy, golden-brown bees that help pollinate our produce at the Haverfarm. The honeybees you encounter on campus are most likely female worker bees collecting pollen and...
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Autumnal Nights: The Full Moon and Evening Star
Columns Stargazing

Autumnal Nights: The Full Moon and Evening Star

Karen Masters

Read Haverford Physics and Astronomy Professor Karen Masters’ seasonal guide to stargazing. What’s in store this fall: full moons, eclipses, and Venus, bright in the night sky.

A photo of the moon and Venus in the sky. Photo by Sean Rozekrans via Wikimedia Commons. As the evenings draw in, the Full Moon is a beautiful and accessible stargazing object. As is the case in the Spring, many cultures have festivals during the Fall that are set by the Lunar Calendar, and so they are explicitly or implicitly tied to the Autumnal Moons. For example, the date of Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur is set by the “lunisolar” Hebrew calendar, which means it (usually) starts on the date of the closest New Moon to the Autumnal Equinox (the date when...
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The Amazon Rainforest’s Sinking Carbon Sink
News

The Amazon Rainforest’s Sinking Carbon Sink

Ashley Schefler

The Amazon rainforest is one of the world’s greatest natural wonders, and was once an important carbon sink in the fight against climate change. However, a newly published study ten years in the making shows that the Amazon has switched from being a carbon sink to a carbon source, releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it takes in.

Aerial photograph of the Amazon rainforest taken near Manaus, Brazil. By Neil Palmer/CIAT, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The Amazon rainforest is one of the world’s greatest natural wonders. It is the largest tropical rainforest on Earth, spanning 2.6 million square miles (roughly 70% the size of the United States). The Amazon contains at least 10% of the world’s known species, and, for many years, it has functioned as an important carbon sink. If you’ve been following the news on climate change, you probably know that trees are one of the good guys in the story, able to store...
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