BC Marathon champ heads Woodbine stakes
Afleet Again, the surprise winner of this year's Breeders' Cup Marathon, tops a field of six in Sunday's $150,000 Valedictory Stakes at Woodbine Race Course. The 1 3/4-mile race, the same distance as the Marathon, will be run over Woodbine's synthetic main surface.
Afleet Again, owned by Kasey K Racing Stable, has drawn post three with Cornelio Velasquez returning to ride the four-year-old colt. Butch Reid trains the gray son of Afleet Alex who won the Marathon as a 41-1 longshot.
In the $500,000 Marathon, the gray four-year-old trailed for most of the race, running in ninth about a dozen lengths from the lead. At the top of the stretch a gaggle of horses were on the lead as Afleet Again began to move on the outside. The colt opened up down the stretch and posted a 2 1/4-length victory over Birdrun.
"He was very aggressive, which is rare for this horse," Reid said following the upset win. "This horse is a real Jekyll and Hyde. Sometimes he shows up and sometimes he doesn't really. He (Velasquez) said he was very aggressive. I saw the fractions they were going, 48 in the first half, and he was only six or seven lengths out. I thought we were in pretty good shape."
The Breeders' Cup victory was the colt's first of the year in nine starts and his fourth win in 24 career races. He has lifetime earnings of $686,470.
Making just his third start of the year will be last year's Valedictory runner-up Eye of the Leopard. Trained by Mark Frostad, the five-year-old will be ridden by Luis Contreras from post four.
Eye of the Leopard was off from last year's Valedictory Stakes until the Durham Cup in October when he was fourth. Three weeks ago the Sam-Son Farms' horse finished second at Woodbine in an allowance race.
In 15 career starts Eye of the Leopard has four wins and $921,487.
Here is the full field for the Valedictory in post position order: Alpha Bettor, Tyler Pizarro; Eagle Poise, Patrick Husbands; Afleet Again, Cornelio Velasquez; Eye of the Leopard, Luis Contreras; Harrods Creek, Chantal Sutherland and Getta Rhythm, Justin Stein.
Bc Bee Breeders - News
By Sports Network Afleet Again, the surprise winner of this year's Breeders' Cup Marathon, tops a field of six in Sunday's $150000 Valedictory Stakes at Woodbine Race Course. The 1 3/4-mile race, the same distance as the Marathon, will be run over
Breeders' Cup Marathon winner Afleet Again and last year's Valedictory runner- up Eye of the Leopard went off as the 2-1 co-favorites in the six-horse field. Eagle Poise, second in the 2009 Valedictory, was 3-1 and Bill Mott's Harrods Creek was 7-2.
Chili peppers originated in the Americas and have been a part of the human diet since at least 7500 BC. The Vegetable Magazine Olericulture.org has newly included 341 resources to its Chili Pepper category. Chili pepper is the fruit of plants from the
I guess I'm lucky my role as a future ignorant worker bee saved me from that privilege. And I've heard accounts from women who were raised in the system, and had as their job traumatizing little kids, that they were told it was necessary to make them
Restoring the "Buzz" in honey bee colonies | Victoria Beacon
Honey bees play a major role in agriculture as pollinators of many vegetable, nut, and fruit crops, and they contribute an estimated $2.5 billion to Canadian agriculture and another $15 billion to US agriculture. For BC’s premium crops of blueberries, raspberries and cranberries there have been incalculable losses from the collapse of honey bee colonies.
, Dr. Leonard Foster from the University of BC is developing tools for beekeepers that would allow them to breed more resilient bees.“Disturbingly, this last year there was another drop in the honey bee population by approximately 30% in Canada and the US,” says Foster. “This level of annual loss has been consistent over the past five years in both countries. Contributing factors of these losses are various bacteria, viruses, fungi and mites attacking the bees. Despite some human intervention in the form of chemical pesticides, the culprits have evolved and are now able to resist traditional methods.”
Many social behaviours enable bees to resist disease, such as hygienic behaviour. A cleaner hive tends to suppress the spread of some diseases. By detecting and analyzing naturally occurring proteins and gene traits in the more hygienic bees, these bees can be introduced into breeding programs.
In addition to protein analysis, Foster is developing an approach for treating the viruses that affect bees using RNAi, the biological system that controls which genes are turned ‘on’ and ‘off’, to create a treatment that is specific to this organism. The method is expected to have no detrimental side effects and there is also essentially no way that the organism can develop a resistance to it.
The tools being developed in this project are expected to be less susceptible to evolutionary resistance and the development timeline should be less than traditional pesticides.
Due to Canada’s mild climate, most bee breeding happens in BC and the impact of bees across North America is enormous. BC breeders ship bees across Canada to promote pollination and the establishment of new colonies. The expected results from the research will generate significant benefits to Canadian agriculture and should lead to a decrease in colony losses, increased honey production and greater availability of bees for pollination.