If you drink tea or coffee with sugar or you have flavoured syrups in your coffee shop drinks, you could be unwittingly damaging your teeth and adding unhelpful calories to your diet. A wide variety of tablet or granular artificial sweeteners are available and are safe to consume in your hot drinks.
Beech bark disease is the result of a complex interaction between three non-native pests (a tiny scale insect and two species of Nectria fungus) and a native Nectria fungus. The beech scale insect wounds the tree by piercing the bark with sharp mouth parts and sucking out the sap.
White fuzziness on beech trees are caused by the beech scale that carries the deadly beech bark disease. | Photo by Georgia Peterson. Many people have already become aware of the devastating impact beech bark disease is having in the eastern Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula.