Honeybees continue to amaze, inspire and astound me. Who knew that bees sleep? and that it affects their learning ability just like us people. But it is not all work, work, work. Busy bees have to sleep, too. Similar to our circadian rhythm, honeybees sleep…
As if beekeepers didn’t have more to worry about. There’s a fly that is laying it’s eggs on honeybees, which in turn kills the bee. Flies attach themselves to the bees and inject their eggs, causing erratic “zombie-like” behavior in the bees such as flying…
Dan Nosowitz from AtlasObscura asks about the smartest bugs in the world? What is ‘Smartest’, after all? Of course after a while, the subject of bees comes up. Bees are capable of observation, learning, and memory to solve problems. “Every bee is entirely flower-naive at…
We have field tested this Beehive Fence design in three rural farming communities in Kenya with over 80% success rate. Any type of beehive can be used although our project focuses on using Kenyan Top Bar Hives and Langstroth Hives as they swing efficiently in…
This behavior is key to recovering from the Verroa mite epidemic. Ciro Invernizzi and colleagues from the Facultad de Ciencias, Montevideo, Uruguay, compared grooming behaviour in Italian (Apis mellifera ligustica) and Africanized bees. They found that at the individual level, Africanized bees showed a higher…
What a fascinating study of honeybees. I don’t think the article from The Register gets it right however. If a hive is queenless, workers will become “laying” workers in order to create new queens for the colony. Cape worker honeybees have the ability to invade…
Hopefully this sort of theft doesn’t find itself to the east coast of the United States. To complicate matters, bee brokers who arrange contracts between beekeepers and almond growers are discovering that there are not enough beehives to go around, driving up demand, rental costs…
The driver with the trailer loaded with 400 hives was involved in a multi-vehicle wreck. The bees were unhappy with the situation. Crews called in a group of beekeepers to help. After about an hour, the swarm cleared. A beekeeper told Channel 9 that bees…
Interesting 2014 study linking Neonics and CCD. “Bees from six of the 12 neonicotinoid-treated colonies had abandoned their hives and were eventually dead with symptoms resembling CCD,” the team wrote. “However, we observed a complete opposite phenomenon in the control colonies.” Only one control colony…
