honeybees
milhayser | May 14, 2013Last week the European Union voted to ban neonicotinoid pesticides in an effort to fight colony collapse disorder among honeybees. Although research has clearly fingered these pesticides in bee behavioral problems, the ban is still rather speculative, as multiple environmental factors may be at play in CCD. Greg Laden writes "navigation over long distances, communicating with other bees about newly found hard to get and far away sources of food, mechanisms of controlling reproduction within the colony, thermoregulation of the hive, building and maintaining architecture," and other bee…
edyong | August 25, 2009Since late 2006, honeybees in Europe and North America have been mysteriously disappearing. Once abuzz with activity, hives suddenly turned into honeycombed Marie Celestes. They still had plentiful supplies of honey, pollen and youngsters but the adult workers vanished with no traces of their bodies. The phenomenon has been dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD). In the first winter when it struck, US hive populations crashed by 23% and in the next winter, they fell again by a further 36%.
Eager to avert the economic catastrophe that a bee-less world, scientists have been trying to find the…
edyong | August 23, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. There's been more work on CCD since, but I'm reposting this mainly because of some interesting follow-up research that will I will post about tomorrow.
In 2006, American and European beekeepers started noticing a strange and worrying trend - their bees were disappearing. Their hives, usually abuzz with activity, were emptying. There were no traces of the workers or their corpses either in or around the ghost hives, which still contained larvae and plentiful stores of food. It seemed that entire…
awild | May 22, 2008
Spring is swarm season for honeybees, and the feral population in Tucson is booming. We've got not one but two new colonies nesting in dead trees in our yard. I didn't do anything to attract them, they just moved in on their own.
My feelings about honey bees are mixed.
On one hand, I have many fond memories of working as a beekeeper back when I was in Peace Corps. There's something exhilarating about opening a hive, feeling the vibration of thousands of little wings, the scent of honey and wax thick in the air. Bees are charismatic creatures, and although I worked with them pretty…