Bee hills
With some 180 kinds of wild bees, Maastricht can call itself ‘bee capital’ of the Netherlands. But the natural habitat of the insects is under threat here too, in spite of the ever-growing number of ‘bee hotels’. These wooden, above-ground nesting places unfortunately don’t offer much help for most types, as they dig their breeding rooms in the ground.
To also offer some aid to these ‘tunnel digging’ bees, the Centre for Nature and Environmental Education, (Centrum voor Natuur- en Milieueducatie, CNME), has erected ten bee hotspots spread across Maastricht: little hills made from various type of soil and sown with seeds of different indigenous flowers – to suit all tastes.
One of them was erected on UM grounds. Originally on waste land in Randwyck, but this is where the hill suddenly had to make way for the arrival of new student accommodation, as project leader Peter Alblas from the CNME previously informed RTV Maastricht. Upon which the soil, already put in place, was moved to a field alongside Oxfordlaan 55. The hotspot reached completion with the sowing of seeds for the flowers last week. Members of the nanoscopy team from institute M4I (Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences), who like to spend their lunch breaks there and who had planted fruit trees there earlier this year, offered a helping hand, in the form of a buzzing team outing.
Tabak picks up cigarette butts
In Maastricht, it is a problem too: despite the ban on smoking on all university premises, cigarette butts can often be found lying on the ground around the university buildings. Often just outside the smoke-free zones. There were ideas at the law faculty council to copy the Swedish system in which crows are trained to pick up trodden-on cigarette butts, but in Rotterdam, a student at the Erasmus University took matters into his own hands, university newspaper Erasmus Magazine writes.
Master’s student Enoch Tabak (tobacco in Dutch, what’s in a name) explores the pavement during his lunchbreak every Friday. Usually after half an hour, he has collected a small shopping bag full of cigarette butts. “It is a subtle way of making people aware,” Tabak explains. “This non-verbal communication is much more effective than direct remarks such as ‘stop that’ or ‘do this or do that’. Sometimes, we talk too much and do too little.” He encourages the rest of the community to join in.
First thesis on orchestra musicians
A PhD thesis about orchestra musicians: that had never been done before. Heather Kurzbauer from the Faculty of Law will defend hers at the University of Amsterdam this week. In it, she describes how financially vulnerable orchestras and especially the freelance musicians playing in them, are. It is something that she personally experienced, Kurzbauer tells university newspaper Folia.
She played as a violinist in Radio Kamer Filharmonie until it was completely stripped of its budget in 2013. With the golden handshake (the amount is unknown), she financed her own research into how something like this could happen. First of all, there is the neoliberal approach to the economy: can this not be done more efficiently, reducing costs? “But it is difficult to make the art sector more efficient. A Beethoven symphony that you play with forty people in forty minutes can never be played with twenty people in twenty minutes.”
Then there is the vulnerable position of musicians, who often have to work a lot for little money and who are regularly pseudo-self-employed – they do the same work as someone with a permanent contract, but for less money. “Even a top graduate from an academy of music has to pay the rent by hustling for gigs.” That really has to get better, but for that to happen, the musicians themselves will have to take action, says Kurzbauer. “Travelling to Bolsward for four days to play for two hundred euro, without travelling expenses? I say, stay at home and become a union member, so that they can fight for you. Otherwise, we will never be able to change the system.”