ARS

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio. While driving, have you ever wondered why there are so many fences to interrupt your soul-satisfying, wide-open-spaces...

They say that variety is the spice of life. Well, you can’t get much more variety than in the plant world. Genetic variation exists for many traits in all crops. For example, although most carrots on grocers’ shelves are orange, carrots can also be white, yellow, green, or purple. Most potatoes are...

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio. As adults, we have heard for years about the value of adding fish to our diets. But have you ever stopped to consider...

This story has three parts. Read Part 1 here. Read Part 2 here. For an hour or so, that’s how it went: on one side of the roof, I smoked the bees and removed capped frames, volunteers ran the capped frames over to the extractor on the other side of the roof, and the extractor team spun the honey out...

This story has three parts. Read Part 1 here. Stay tuned for Part 3 later. The hive is basically a stack of wooden boxes. Within each box a series of frames rest vertically. Each frame is about an inch thick and has built-in cells. The cells are where the bees place the nectar they’ve taken from...

This story has three parts. Please look for the next two parts over the next two days. July 15 was one of the most exciting days I’ve experienced in my short time as co-beekeeper for the USDA People’s Garden. It was hot, humid, and hazy that morning, when I—together with seven partners and...

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA’s rich science and research portfolio. What are U.S. farms like? Are they largely family businesses, or corporate operations? Describing farms is challenging...

Written By Jessica L. Morrison; USDA Forest Service Conservation Education Intern As a volunteer intern for the Conservation Education department of the Forest Service, I was not expecting much more than to be cooped up in a cubical somewhere; making copies and filing things away into nonexistence...

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio. By Tara Weaver-Missick, Branch Chief, with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Summer field sports are under...

Written by Rick Borchelt Butterflies are a great barometer of the health of our environment – because they spend part of their lives as caterpillars eating leaves and other vegetation, and part as adults visiting flowers and other food sources, they can be exposed to many contaminants that give us...