AP Photo

     Here is a perfectly natural chicken. No added salt. No added water. Cut off its head and its feet, tear off its feathers and rip its guts out, then cover its corpse with ice, and it's still considered "natural" although, of course, altered. If you sell or package it from the ice, it's still a natural bird. And if you add salt, water, tenderizers, preservatives and other additives, up to 15 percent of the final weight? Still a natural chicken, according to current USDA standards. Some consumer groups and poultry industry insiders would like to change the rules. Perdue, for example, is part of a group called the Truthful Labeling Coalition, which is calling for chicken with additives to be labeled "chicken with additives." Perdue doesn't use additives. Pilgrim's Pride and Tyson Foods do. They think the current labeling system is just fine. Juliana Barbassa, an AP writer reporting in the San Francisco Chronicle, looked into the matter. You can read her story here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/07/30/financial/f001949D92.DTL

Penn State photo by Maryann Frazier

     Honeybees are in decline. Still. Frustratingly so. Penn State, a world leader in the study of honeybee colony collapse disorder, hosted the first international conference on pollinator biology, health and policy the other week. Bee experts from as far away as Kenya, Israel and Brazil attended the three-day conference in State College, and they were all abuzz about CCD. Problem is, nobody really understands it, and the more scientists look into it, the more puzzles they uncover. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres sat in on the conference and prepared a report for our current edition. You can check it out at our website, LancasterFarming.com.

     And here's some more about bees:

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/sweeter-deal-beekeeping-goes-green/xz0t3uw1