All abuzz: Ken Ensminger is going into this spring with 8.4 million fewer friends. Since January, the Concordia Parish beekeeper tells The Natchez Democrat he has seen 42 of his 144 hives die, losing 200,000 bees with each failed hive. “Pesticides are my thinking on what caused it,” Ensminger says. “One theory is they get out there and get into some kind of chemical, bring it in and put it in our hives where they live with it, and when you look up, they are dead.” The deaths highlight increasing challenges for beekeepers in Louisiana and Mississippi, whose industry not only includes cottage operations but often loaning bees to other parts of the country during slow months of the year at home. Read the full story.
By the numbers: U.S. job openings surged in February to a 14-year high, yet employers filled fewer of those jobs than in the previous month. On a brighter note, the Labor Department also says that layoffs fell sharply. Taken together, the figures suggest that signs of a stumbling economy have prompted U.S. businesses to pull back on hiring. But they weren’t spooked enough to cut more jobs. The number of available jobs rose 3.4% in February to 5.1 million, the government says, the most since January 2001. As The Associated Press reports, that indicates companies want to add staff. Yet total hiring slipped 1.6% to 4.9 million. Layoffs, meanwhile, plummeted 7.6% to 1.6 million, the lowest level in 16 months. That points to a high degree of job security for those Americans who are employed.
Supply and demand: The United States can boost its consumption of the light oil increasingly flowing out of domestic wells today, a new government report finds, even as it warns that potential changes to the nation’s longstanding ban on raw crude exports risk undermining those investments. As FuelFix.com reports, the analysis issued by the government’s Energy Information Administration is the fourth in a series of studies examining U.S. oil production, imports and gasoline prices in light of the nation’s crude export ban. Producers who have been clamoring for the opportunity to sell their crude overseas have said the change is needed because domestic “light, tight oil” production from dense rock formations is outpacing the transportation and refining infrastructure needed to process it domestically. Read the full story.
