More prizes for elephants and bees project Dr Lucy King (2005), whose ground-breaking elephants and bees project has been covered in previous editions of Floreat Domus, has been awarded the 2013 St Andrews Prize for the Environment. the prize has helped lucy build a new project office and honey processing room at sagalla, next to tsavo east national Park in southern Kenya, where she hopes to train other farming communities in the area, and funded her website, elephantsandbees.com, where you can read about the project. she hopes that the prize will bring her financial support, which, she says, will ‘enable us to expand our vital research work around africa and protect many more rural farming families from elephant invasions’. a longer-term aim is ‘to go
to asia and see if we can adapt this for asian elephants and farmers, using different types of bees and different elephants’. lucy was also one of the winners of the future for nature award 2013, presented by the primatologist dr Jane goodall, who praised the winners as examples to the next generation of nature conservationists.
Dr Lucy E. King
lucy’s team (working with oxford university, save the elephants and disney worldwide conservation fund) used the discovery that elephants are scared of african honey bees to create beehive fences which help farmers in Kenya protect their crops from damage by elephant raids. it is, lucy says, ‘a very holistic project’, with multiple benefits. it has enabled farmers to increase crop production; with less incidence of conflict between elephants and humans, fewer of both are being injured; and the farmers gain income through the sale of ‘elephant friendly’ honey and bee products.
A Balliol 375th anniversary By martin Burton (reseArch felloW in clinicAl Medicine) in 1639 nathaniel conopius came to balliol from constantinople, as a refugee from persecution. He brought with him an eastern habit that was to become universally popular: coffee drinking. the reasons for conopius’s flight are well described by wood:
. . . he became one of the chaplains or petty canons of Christ Church . . . In the beginning of Nov. 1648 he was expelled the university by the barbarians, I mean the parliamentarian visitors, and had nothing left to maintain him as a scholar and a divine. So that because of the barbarity of such who called themselves saints, and the godly party, he returned into his own country among the barbarians, and was made bishop of Smyrna called Le Smerne, about the year 1651.4
today the college’s connection with coffee continues, through an association, via the oxford martin school and its director and balliol fellow ian goldin, with andrea illy, chairman and ceo of illycaffè s.p.a. the famous italian coffee business – and, of course, in the enthusiasm with which members consume it.
1 Wood, A A, and P Bliss, Athenae Oxonienses . . . To which are added the fasti or annals of the said university, etc., new ed. with additions and a continuation by Philip Bliss (1813: London). 2 Rackham, O, Treasures of Silver at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Cambridge: CUP, 2002). 3 Doll, P M, Anglicanism and Orthodoxy 300 years after the ‘Greek College’ in Oxford (Peter Lang, 2006). 4 Wood, A A, and P Bliss, Athenae Oxonienses, op. cit. iStockphoto/woraput
Nathaniel Conopius, a Cretan born, trained up in the Greek church, and became primore to Cyrill, Patriarch of Constantinople . . . When the said Cyrill was strangled by the visier (the grand seignior of the Turks being not then returned from the siege of Babylon) Conopius, to avoid the like barbarity, fled thence and went to England, and addressing himself with credentials . . . to Dr. Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, that worthy person sent him to Balliol Coll. and allowed him a comfortable subsistence during his abode there . . . It was observed that while he continued in Bal. Coll. he made the drink for his own use called coffee, and usually drank it every morning, being the first, as the antients of that house have informed me, that was ever drunk in Oxon.1
this was apparently the introduction of coffee drinking not only to oxford but also to western europe.2 conopius is said to have taken the degree of bachelor of divinity in 1642 or 1643, but he did not stay long in oxford. He was sponsored by archbishop laud and charles i, and in ‘1645, with the war going badly for the king, he left oxford for the university of leyden in the netherlands’.3 He subsequently returned and
issue no.20 June 2014
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