I have become a pariah in my neighborhood because I asked Calvert Mosquito Control to put my property on their Do-Not-Spray list. However, after attending a bee talk given by the 17- and 18-year-old members of the Northern High School Bee Club, I began to question the whole pesticide problem.      So far, the facts are disturbing. It seems that studies done by scientists — which the government uses for safety guidelines — are done by chemical...

     Whether you’re taking tools to hand, sketching in a notebook, shooting with a camera, setting up an easel or playing at cabaret, you’re demonstrating that homo sapiens is also homo faber. We humans can’t stop ourselves from making things.       In Bay Weekly, we’ve found ourselves drawn to stories about making and makers.   Art en Plein Air      From Annapolis to Solomons, art is in the air, on the streets,...

     Michael Bell is no stranger to success. The Southern High School arts department chair and celebrity artist has catapulted the school’s art program into the national spotlight over the last 22 years, winning major awards annually and transforming the lives of his students.      “My art department at Southern is almost like the Lakers of the old days,” Bell told me. “We keep winning, and people keep waiting for us to not win anymore. It...

     As summer ends, toadstools seem to appear from nowhere.      Technically speaking, a toadstool is a mushroom is a fungus — the same. They are all the fleshy, fruiting bodies growing above ground with a stem, a cap and pores or gills. While it may seem they pop up overnight after a rain, they have been growing for days or weeks. Beneath ground, their inner-connecting root systems can tangle over great distances. (In Oregon, a giant mushroom infiltrates 2,...