I feed the birds everyday but have never considered that the bees also might need some food. According to this article gardeners are being urged to leave out energy drinks for tired bees to try and help the declining bee population. The RSPB has been inundated with calls reporting bees lying on the ground unable to fly. They recommend leaving out an egg cup filled with two tablespoons of sugar and a tablespoon of water so that tired bees can boost their energy levels.

Having just moved house I have been having a look at some furniture websites with a view to replacing some of our old furniture with items that fit better in our new home. One of the websites I came across is Spacify who have a good range of contemporary Dining Tables and coffee tables. I quite liked this Vincent Extendible Dining Table which has a walnut finish and is made in  Italy. It is available with free delivery within the US and Spacify offer a 100% price match so if you should find a lower online price they will give you 100% of the difference.

Tesco are now offering double the amount of loyalty card points in a bid to tempt more customers. According to the article sales growth at Tesco has been outpaced by its main rivals in the past year prompting the supermarket to look at new ways of retaining customers. All Clubcard holders will now receive double the amount of rewards every time they shop meaning you will now get two point for every pound you spend in store or online. I do have a Tesco Clubcard but personally I find I currently receive very little rewards and that I frequently forget to use the vouchers I receive. I wonder why Tesco don’t go the same way as Sainsbury’s and simply allow you to take the money off your shopping bill at the checkout. I find this works a lot better and means that I can save my points up for an expensive event such as Christmas to buy a few luxury items that we wouldn’t usually be able to afford.

I have spent quite a lot of time looking for new web site hosting provider over the past few weeks and have been a bit overwhelmed by the amount of choice out there. Not knowing an awful lot about web hosting it can be a little hard to know who to choose. Obviously the most important factors are reliability and uptime and also the level of support that is available when there are any problems but the problem is not knowing this information before signing up. That’s where comparison websites such as Web Hosting Geeks can come in really useful. They offer information and review about hosting providers so you can get a better idea about how they perform. They also highlight which hosting providers perform best in certain categories, for example the best budget hosting or the best blog hosting. Each hosting provider is reviewed with a short overview of the service and bullet points highlighting the main features of the service such as how much storage space you get, whether they offer multiple domain hosting, what sort of support is available and how much bandwidth you get. There are also individual reviews from customers who have used each hosting provider so you can find out what their current customers think. It’s all very useful stuff and well worth checking out if you are looking for help with choosing a hosting provider.

If you are looking for a new furry friend then you might want to contact Battersea Dogs Home. Whilst it might not be the first place you would expect to find cats, they do in fact also re-home other animals as well. At the moment they simply have too many cats with 143 of their 145 cat pens being full and 174 cats waiting for a place at the home. The shelter has blamed the recession for the 20% rise in the number of animals being dumped but there are also 10% fewer people who are taking on cats leading to the huge backlog. Some of the cats have been waiting for a new home for as long as a year. Unfortunately I already have fours cats so don’t have room for anymore but if you have room for another kitty in your life then you might want to contact them, you can see some the furries here.

If this article is to be believed eating junk food does not only cause you to gain weight, it can also make you less intelligent. Research was carried out at Oxford University on a group of rats. The rats were fed a high fat diet over ten days. It was found that the rodents short term memory was damaged and that they were less mentally alert. The high fat diet also decreased the rats ability to exercise in turn making them more likely to gain weight.

Its a busy time for students as they receive their A Level results this week and there has been lots in the news about record pass rates and those students that have received all A grades. With headlines like this is easy to forget that not all students are lucky enough to get enough points for their chosen course. Whilst it might seem like the end of the world if you can’t get on your chosen course there is lots of help available when looking into alternative. That’s where the UCAS Clearing system can help. The University of Bedfordshire has already opened up their Clearing 2009 vacancies and have a variety of different courses available. If you need help you can contact the University of Bedfordshire Clearing 2009 hotline on 0800 013 0925 and see how they can help you.

It appears its all change for the Oxo cube as the traditional cube gets a new shape. Rather than being a simple cube it will now have grooves cut into it making it into a X shape. The reason for the change is that the new shape is supposed to be easier to crumble than the traditional cube alternative.

According to this article the average British family throw away £610 of food every year. The figure is based on a household with children and amounts to 6.5 million tonnes of rubbish. Based on this ministers want supermarkets to replace buy one get one free offers in favour of half price deals as well as introducing a larger range of pack sizes. They also want supermarkets to use clearer labels so that customers are sure of the difference between the use by date and the best before date. The article made me wonder how much of our household waste is food waste. I am certainly getting better at reducing the amount of rubbish we produce and try to make as much use of leftovers as possible mainly to try and save a bit of money but we still seem to have several sacks of rubbish every week.

Several major shoe brands have demanded a moratorium on the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Clark, Adidas, Nike and Timberland are among the brands that are putting pressure on suppliers to make changes. According to this article around 65 to 75% of deforestation is linked to the growth of ranching. As well as the moratorium on leather from newly deforested areas the footwear makers want suppliers to bring in a traceability system which will guarantee the source of all leather. Currently some Brazilian companies linked to rainforest destruction export products to blue chip companies across the world. The three major processors Bertin, JBS and Marfrig have now agreed to reject cattle from illegally deforested land. The footwear companies will also refuse to buy leather which is sourced from farms on both legally and illegally deforested land.

According to this article Asda has actually increased the price of one one in five of its products despite its pledge to roll back prices. Trade magazine The Grocer has found that in many cases the supermarket has been rounding price up rather than down. It checked 969 products and found that 173 actually cost more in July than they did in March. A third of the products were the same price that they had been in March and 477 products were cheaper in July than in March. The Grocer found that one in five of the round pound lines which are heavily publicised has been sold for less than pound in recent months. Often customers often see the items priced at a £1.00 and fail to realise that they were actually previously on sale at a cheaper price.