With the current threats facing bees and other pollinators, including pesticides, diseases, and habitat loss, various nations and leaders are doing what they can to help increase population numbers. At the same time, however, some initiatives can be helpful while others may have unforeseen consequences. For example, the government of Israel intends to pass a…
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The High Line, a park located in New York City, is a beautiful place to visit where you can admire trees and flowers inside a concrete-heavy city. While it is doubtful for a small patch of soil in between two concrete slabs to catch your attention, Maryanne Stubs knows better. Stubs is an NYC gardener…
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The honeybee’s cousins are gaining more attention this week due to new research from the University of California Riverside. Wild bee species are quickly becoming more important to the pollination and honey-making process due to the growing increase in colony collapse disorder (CCD), which is negatively affecting millions of honeybees all over the world. Bearing…
DetailsWith awareness growing for colony collapse disorder (CCD) and declining honeybee populations, the safe assumption would be that great efforts have been made in saving bees and preventing the loss of one of our most important pollinators. However, according to the word of some in the field, the exponential growth in the number of beekeepers…
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With spring in full swing, many large scale orchards have begun working with beekeepers, in that beekeepers set up their colonies to pollinate the orchard’s crop while ensuring their honeybees have ample sources of nectar during blooming season. Whether it’s apple or almond production, the honeybees form mutually beneficially relationships with the crops. Of course,…
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Many know about beekeeping as the way in which honey is made available for typical grocery stores or the local farmer’s market—done by those men and women raising and caring for honeybees and gathering surplus honey from the hives to sell on the market, with beekeepers ideally having enough colonies to not affect the bees’ winter…
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Over the last year, some real progress has been made in understanding why we are seeing such a decline in the bee population. One of the more interesting studies recently done that has put a huge spotlight on the problem was conducted at James Cook University. In this study, researchers found the flowers honey bees…
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Over the past year, there has been a lot of talk in the media and on blogs like ours regarding the plight of the honey bee. With recent government cutbacks on bee surveys, the honey bee has made its way into the political realm. This has introduced the honey bee to an entirely different audience.…
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For all the negative stories about the plight of honey bees right now, it is so refreshing when we see or hear about a story where even a few people are trying to make a difference. Such is the story of Will Hatchel, who has created a sort of “bee oasis” in the backyard of…
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The decline of honey bee populations over this past winter is beginning to get the attention of scientists around the world, and that is not exactly a good thing. The reason so much attention is being paid to the subject is that these experts believe we may truly have a crisis on our hands that…
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Something beekeepers have feared for some time may finally be happening. New reports have revealed that the bumblebee community may now be facing the same virus problems that are decimating the honey bee community. If this is happening, two major pollinators are now facing significant danger and possible extinction in years to come. Sound the…
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Thomas Seeley is arguably one of the most respected voices in the world on the behavior of bees. His new book, “The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild,” is already drawing wide acclaim. The good news for bee lovers is you do not have to have a master’s…
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As a way of helping commercial and hobbyist beekeepers track the many environmental stressors honey bees experience, Penn State’s Pollinator Research Center and the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, as well as several other collaborators, developed an app called Beescape, which can be used for monitoring environmental factors around hives, farms, and gardens where…
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Despite there being a beehive on the state seal of Utah, honey bees aren’t “Beehive State” natives, having arrived with Brigham Young and the rest of the Mormon settlers in the 1840s. Young even called this new region “Deseret,” which means “honey bee” in the Book of Mormon. Considerably less renown would be Utah’s prominent…
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At 81 years of age, Morgan Freeman is one of the most recognizable faces—and voices—in the acting industry as well as the world in general. He’s taken on so many different roles in his long career that it’s hard to remember them all, but it’s one of his newer, lesser-known roles that could be the…
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In the year 1981, the largest known bee in the world was believed to have gone extinct, and it wasn’t the first time this had occurred. The Wallace giant bee, which originated in the Indonesian rainforests, is roughly four times the size of a regular honey bee, with the females (males being half their size)…
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Since 2017, the state of Assam, India has seen a unique technique develop straight out of nature, and it has specifically protected countless elephants from losing their lives on railway tracks. This innovation, put in place by the Northeast Frontier Railways (NFR), involved using the amplified sounds of honey bees, and the downloaded noises eventually…
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As we all remember, Hurricanes Maria and Irma knocked out the electricity in Puerto Rico and uprooted thousands, but the storms wreaked havoc upon the island’s smaller community members as well—billions of domesticated and wild honey bees were displaced or killed as a result of the storms and the aftermath. Now, roughly 18 months later,…
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After examining a century of bumblebee records, a newly published study in the Journal of Insect Conservation has revealed that nearly half of the species in the state of Vermont, all of which are crucial pollinators like their honey bee cousins, are either in severe decline or have vanished entirely. This study, which was led…
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When Australian beekeeper Scott Whitaker cut into a bathroom ceiling in the Queensland town of Sunshine Coast, he encountered something he could describe only “as a monster” — the biggest honey bee colony he ever had to remove from someone’s home. Over 50,000 honey bees were packed into the bathroom ceiling, along with so much…
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Down in Cape Town, South Africa, a suspected poisoning took place in a wine-making area of the region, and this incident led to roughly one million honeybees dying. According to Brendan Ashley-Cooper, a beekeeper and farmer, an insecticide the wine farmers often use called Fipronil was believed to have caused the bees on his land…
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In the past 10-15 years, honey bees and other bee species all over the world have been seeing declining numbers, much to the dismay of beekeepers everywhere as well as anyone who enjoys the sweet taste of natural raw honey. With this knowledge in mind, many nations are making efforts to help the ailing pollinators,…
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While research into neonicotinoid pesticides, which have proven to be harmful to pollinators like honey bees, has brought about many new revelations, scientists announced recent findings that provide new insight into how these pesticides affect the declining pollinating species around the world. It turns out exposure to a specific neonicotinoid pesticide called imidacloprid causes complex…
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According to a study recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the weed-killer known as glyphosate decreases the microorganisms in a honey bee’s guts, and such changes leave the insects much more likely to die an early death. These lost but helpful microorganisms in the guts of honey bees are directly…
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For those who live in Southwest Florida, it’s likely you know about the region’s algae problem, and it turns out more than just the wildlife in the Gulf are being affected by it. According to local bee experts, honey bees are experiencing problems in areas with blue-green and red tide algae. Keith Councell, the vice…
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For beekeepers, smoke is one of their secret weapons for keeping bee stings to a minimum and has been for thousands of years, with some 2,500-year-old ancient Egyptian artwork depicting the practice. Despite how long smoke has been used to calm honey bees, however, it’s still unknown why it occurs—though some new research that was…
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Despite domesticated beehives having a global population between 80 and 100 million, each of which contain 10,000-60,000 individual bees, their numbers are dropping quickly, with beekeepers reporting 40 percent losses each year and several bumblebee species even going on the endangered species list. Given bees pollinate roughly a third of the world’s food crop and…
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There is plenty of talk going around about what Manuka honey can offer for people, but we aren’t the only ones who can benefit from the fairly recently discovered powerhouse honey. From the smallest of our pets to the wildest of animals, Manuka honey can be very effective, which one very lucky hedgehog can attest…
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As many know, honeybees and other bee species are essential parts of our ecosystems in addition to being a crucial part of many world economies, including our own here in the United States. However, with colony collapse disorder (CCD) and various other factors, particularly pesticide overuse, diseases, and parasites, rearing their ugly heads, there has…
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Though honeybees are our go-to source for honey and pollination, there are other bees out there that pollinate plants and the crops we use for food. Interestingly, unlike honeybees, most of the over 4,000 species of bees on the North American continent don’t live in colonies. Actually, most native bee species are solitary—nesting in cavities,…
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Something that came to light during yesterday’s post about the introduction of alien bees into an environment in Arab states got me to wondering if this is a problem other areas of the world are experiencing. It did not take long to find out it is actually becoming a problem throughout the world. A study…
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For relatively new beekeepers, there is likely nothing more frustrating than coming up to check your hives, only to find that half of them have vacated the hive entirely. Fortunately, this is not a case of colony collapse disorder, which results in all of a hive’s worker bees suddenly disappearing. More than likely, the missing…
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The decline of honey bees has gotten most of the world’s attention, thanks in large part to the staggering scare that is colony collapse disorder (CCD), which is the enigma that sees entire colonies, specially the thousands of worker bees within a hive, disappear, leaving only the queen, male drones, and immature baby bees and…
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For much of the United States, the weather following New Year’s Day is what you would expect of January winter weather—30 degrees for many parts of the central U.S. and low 20s in places on the East Coast. However, some spots on the map are seeing much more favorable temperatures, with places like Las Vegas…
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For those who live outside of California, the wildfires taking place within the state’s borders and their record-shattering devastation may not have had everyone’s attention. However, it surely had the attention of Ventura, California residents Steve and Kelly Nimmer. After being woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call from their…
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Roughly two miles from the Pacific Ocean lies an abbey, specifically the Prince of Peace Abbey, which sits on a hill within the town Oceanside, California. Since 1958, the monks of this abbey have been leading their lives through work and prayer, with Blaise Heuke in particular joining right after finishing high school. According to…
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Recent weeks allowed several employees with Virginia’s transportation department to flex their beekeeping skills at work by saving approximately 120,000 honeybees in Amelia and Powhatan counties, allowing the bees to carry on and pollinate as they see fit. While removing dangerous, leaning trees within Powhatan County, a VDOT crew discovered a honeybee hive inside a…
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As many travelers have noticed, airports require miles of land to operate effectively and safely, but much of this land ends up being a few mile-long runways and many miles of fields untouched by cattle or other livestock, most wildlife, or crops—a lost opportunity some might say. However, there have been several airports in different…
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Until 2010, honeybees were considered “wild animals” per New York City’s Department of Health. This meant that keeping bees within city limits was illegal, despite a handful of rogue apiarists operating anyway. However, when the city lifted the ban, it unleashed a local honey movement that has yet to show any signs of slowing down.…
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In 2006, the arrival of the unexplainable, unexpected colony collapse disorder spooked enough individuals in the United States and beyond into taking notice of the plight of honey bees and various other pollinators, such as monarch butterflies, hummingbirds, and native wild bee species. While some debated the veracity of one specific cause being the reason…
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