It seems that every day of the year has some type of holiday or subject for celebration, and most areas of interest can name a day of the year belonging to them, whether it’s dogs, pencils, brothers, spinach, LGBT pride, veterans, or days of remembrance for specific events. Just like the other endless topics, honeybees…
When it comes to preserving honeybee colonies, many beekeepers succeed in fighting off certain threats to bees but struggle with others, and the varroa mite, a parasite and vector for viruses that is believed to be a major cause of colony collapse disorder, has been a consistent threat to honeybees since the late 1980s. While…
Whether it’s bats, butterflies, birds, or honeybees, pollinators are largely in decline. Honeybees have been studied especially in this regard because the number of factors contributing to collapsed colonies cannot be nailed down by researchers or beekeepers. In the Journal of Economy Entomology, one paper recently focused on just one of these known factors: the…
With 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…
With the fear that has come with the Zika virus into the US, many towns are coming up with ways to combat mosquito populations and keep them controlled, since Zika travels in mosquitoes as vectors. Granted, if a specific area hasn’t had much rain, mosquito populations tend to decrease, since they need about ten days’…
Given how much devastation is caused by varroa mites and nosema parasites on honeybee colonies, beekeepers are always looking for new solutions to try and build their bees’ resistance to diseases and other effects garnered by the small but deadly pests. In recent days, a new product has been slowly gathering notice in terms of…
It’s been well reported that honeybee populations are declining not only in the United States but also around the globe, with the suspected reasons including pathogens, malnutrition, loss of habitat, and, of course, pesticides (or more specifically neonicotinoid pesticides). While it’s been heavily suspected that pesticides are a contributing factor to colony collapse disorder (CCD)…
In recent months, there have been legislative efforts in various US states to place restrictions on pesticides (specifically neonicotinoids) that are believed by some experts to be harmful to honeybees and other pollinators. Maryland in particular has led the charge by its General Assembly passing the first statewide consumer restriction on neonicotinoids earlier this year,…
It’s not uncommon to have one phobia that you either find yourself stuck with for the rest of your life or find yourself getting over after much practice and a lot of patience. It could be spiders, heights, snakes, or even the color yellow, but for Blaine, MN city official Dan Hauck, it has always…
It takes a tremendous dedication and understanding of craft to work as a beekeeper, especially at the rate Carmen Battavio tends to his charges, which at this point has grown to about 50 hives across ten properties in Chester County Pennsylvania. While a plumber by trade, the ten-year veteran beekeeper is working to inform his…
In the United States, there have already been some efforts to place limits on pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are believed to the have deadly effects on honeybees and other pollinators, with honeybees specifically having large declines in the last ten years due to a number of likely reasons that include neonicotinoids. Some states have passed…
While there are many out there who understand that honeybees are endangered and are currently losing many of their populations globally, there are still those out there who remain uninformed on the growing crisis with honeybees and their continuing rate of decline. There are also those whose first instinct upon finding a swarm (half the…
The threats honeybees face this day in age are many, and it’s left researchers on the defensive in terms of finding solutions to save bee populations, whether the threat is colony collapse disorder, pathogens, varroa mites, malnutrition, or pesticides. Considering how important honeybees are, any new threat to them is given full weight and the…
It’s one thing to know about honeybees’ role in our lives—pollinating flowers and the plants that produce our food—as well as their populations declining, but it’s another thing to understand how a honeybee colony’s hive actually works because in its own way, a hive is an organism of sorts, with thousands of individual parts working…
What many likely don’t know about honey is it takes “two million individual blossoms to produce one pound of honey,” says beekeeper Zac Browning, with each individual honeybee producing 1/12 of a teaspoon in its lifetime. With the planting of more row crops in states like North Dakota, Iowa, and so forth, producing that number…
It takes a lot of work and dedication to be a beekeeper, especially in Texas—working in sweltering, summer temperatures in a protective beekeeping suit and lifting between 50-90 pounds of honeycomb all day. For former CIA operative turned beekeeper Tara Chapman, she’s proud to be the uncommon woman who works jobs not often filled by…
It’s probably not hard to figure, but it’s well known that honeybees are important parts of our daily survival and function as a species, which is why so much focus has been placed on finding out what’s causing bees to decline and what we can do to ensure their various sub-species are not lost to…
As many beekeepers have learned, the state of North Dakota is one of the best habitats in the country for raising honeybees, and it’s why one in five bee colonies—about 250 billion bees—spend summer there, producing twice as much honey as any other state. “North Dakota is the last, best place in North America to…
Upon retiring from the Army this past March, Sgt. 1st Class Ben Finch had the plan of expanding his vegetable farm at his Fort Polk home in Louisiana into a larger, commercial operation, and he’s discovered one of the best ways to do this is through honeybees and beekeeping. “Beekeeping looks like a natural way…
For those who haven’t heard of varroa mites, they are small, destructive parasites known for their parasitic relationship with honeybees—more specifically, they’re known for their ability to devastate honeybee colonies and are a likely factor contributing to or are related to colony collapse disorder (CCD). Varroa mites, like all parasites, suck blood from honeybees at…
It’s not an uncommon story that eventually a retiree decides to find a vocation that he or she does less for money and more for enjoyment. A Bemidji, MN man, Les Hiltz, who spent much of his adult life harvesting and caring for his own farm, has decided his retirement vocation would be what was…
It likely makes sense for an industry to take care of the living source of its very income, to not only ensure those in the industry can have that income for as long as possible but to also ensure that living source has a sound quality of life—which is a mutually beneficial relationship predating domestication…
It takes creative talent to communicate a specific goal, message, or theme with a piece art and even more so to get observers to see the point of a piece. British artist Wolfgang Buttress, a man of these intentions, said of his most recent work, “I want visitors to feel enveloped, wrapped-up, and involved in…
As the years have gone on, the US and many other countries have seen honeybee colonies decline at increasing rates per year, sometimes up to 44 percent, with causes linked to pesticides, diseases, mites, malnutrition, and colony collapse disorder (CCD). With such losses becoming well known among the general population, many states have seen increases…
In the past few years, beekeeping has become a more popular hobby as news of declining honeybee populations spreads. Not only does it provide a fun hobby and a source of honey, but beekeeping also contributes a helping hand to the hurting pollinators we rely on so much for our own survival. David Sharpless of Henderson,…
For those who don’t already know what honeybees face, it’s probably safe to say the most you ever thought honeybees could do was sting you and cause a little bit of short term pain. However, as many outside the science and beekeeping communities are beginning to understand, honeybees and other pollinators, tiny as they are,…
We all likely watched episodes of old black-and-white TV shows, and if the series featured a traditional family in a suburb where nothing burned, no one had bathrooms, and generally nothing bad ever happened—more often than not, if the series ever featured firemen, they were not putting out fires but rescuing cats stuck in trees.…
It would be easy to leave the fight for the honeybees to scientists who seek to discover what factors are causing declining populations. In a perfect world, there would be one cause with an easy fix, but the issue of declining bee populations is in fact a complicated one. Considering 75% of the world’s food…
Not too long ago, Pope Francis threw his hat into the ring when it came to the issue of declining honeybee populations, specifically calling for a dialogue about “how we are shaping the planet” and also that families embrace an ecological culture. Megan Ryan, a Catholic Indiana special education teacher and environmentalist, has taken up…
We all have passions when we’re young, and while some of us either lose those passions, grow out of them, or simply find new ones, one New York teen has a long term passion that not only provided direction for his career but could also be the answer to the great enigma that is colony…
We all have career goals and dreams we hope to achieve in our lifetimes, and for Tom Kasper, a South Dakota owner of a lawn and landscape business, that dream was to own and operate his own greenhouse. He even specialized in greenhouse management at North Dakota State University, just to show how much that…
It’s hard to not get nervous whenever coming upon a honeybee hive in the woods or in the backyard. Given honeybees’ ability to protect themselves with their best defense mechanism (that painful stinger), your first reaction would understandably be to assume they are the aggressive stuff of nightmares and to run the away, which as…
Honeybees and a Barn Show When it comes time for siblings to go to college, more often than not they find themselves losing touch and growing apart as the years go on and individual identities are developed. Even so, sometimes the opposite occurs in that despite distance and busier schedules, siblings not only make the…
The threat to honeybees presented by pesticides—specifically those with neonicotinoids—have become so well-known beyond the scientific community that even companies like Scotts Miracle-Gro have started the process of discontinuing their use permanently by certain dates and substituting those harmful products with safer alternatives. Given the rate of loss being around 45 percent of colonies per…
At this point, it is well known that global honeybee populations are in decline, with one survey showing a 44 percent loss of colonies in the US alone. Whether due to parasites, neonicotinoid pesticides, or malnutrition, these losses directly impact people as well, given we rely on honeybees as pollinators, and as a result many…
In response to the global decline of honeybee populations and those of other pollinators, General Mills, the company that gives us Cheerios and its many kinds, has decided to become part of the solution and do what it can to not just salvage these hurting populations but to nurture them and get them back to…
Honeybees, like people, have the ability to balance their nutritional needs and know what they need and want at different times, depending on what they’re lacking or carrying a surplus of. For that reason, bees tend to show preference for certain flowers over others, often those allowing for the best adaptation possible or the best…
For as long as we’ve studied them, pathogens still require further understanding for how they affect living creatures at the rates in which they do. Given the rate at which honeybee colonies are collapsing—almost 30 percent annually—and the fact of pathogens being a contributing factor, there has been much research focusing on how exactly pathogens are…
As many likely know or have at least heard, US honeybee populations are declining for more than one reason including pesticides, lack of nutrition, and the spread of diseases through varroa mites and other parasites acting as vectors (like mosquitoes and malaria). In an effort to understand these factors, especially diseases, USDA and university researchers…
The fight to find out what’s causing the global decline of honeybees requires dedicated students of science and an all-hands-on-deck mentality. Sarah McTish, an entomology student at Penn State, has been such a fighter since she was eight after attending the Penn State Great Insect Fair. “Up to that point I’d loved insects,” she said. “But…
