honey bees
gregladen | April 29, 2013Being a bee is hard. I'm speaking specifically of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, the one that produces the honey you buy in the store. Many insects, and other critters, eat by finding food and then eating it, and then they do that for a while and now and then reproduce by finding a mate, laying eggs that they perhaps put in a good location but thereafter leave alone, etc. etc. But honey bees do all of these thing in a way that makes it seem like they are trying to make it harder for them than it is for everyone else. Much of the food that honey bees eat is gathered at rare and hard to…
sa smith | June 8, 2011To quote me from 2009:Since ~2006, honey bee colonies in the US have been dropping dead overnight. Literally. They call it 'colony collapse disorder'. While large populations of organisms dying is disturbing, no matter the species, we need honey bees-- they help pollinate so many of our crops. I grew up in the banks of the Missouri River, around apple and peach orchards (who always had their own bee hives, and honey) and hell, I eat everything on that list...
What is killing our bees?
People have accused GMOs and wireless internet and pesticides and antibiotics... We didnt have a clue before…
zooillogix | March 3, 2008A few weeks back we brought you a story on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a system developed to compare the relative intensity of Hymenoptera (bees, wasps and ants) stings. The index was developed through personal "research" conducted unintentionally by Dr. Justin Schmidt, an entomologist who has devoted his life to these ornery critters.
As the Index combines all the things Zooillogix readers love (i.e. science and non-life threatening personal injury) the response to the post was strong. Therefore in collaboration with Shelley Batts, formerly of Retrospectacle and now the brand new…
zooillogix | July 23, 2007Turns out that honey bees might not have the ideal socialist society after all. Researchers at Otago University in New Zealand have discovered that worker bees behave like drones because of a powerful, brainwashing pheromone released by the queen. The queen bee prevents aggressive behavior in the workers by releasing homovanillyl alcohol or HVA. As described by the New Zealand Herald, the HVA, released from the queen's mandibles, "blocks aversive learning, the acquisition of negative memories which would normally trigger an aggressive 'sting reflex' in the bees." Bees who don't learn to sting…