While experts welcome the rising national interest in beekeeping as a hobby, they warn that novices may be inadvertently putting their hives — and other hives for miles around — in danger by not keeping the bee mite population in check. Many hobbyists avoid mite…
There are so many factors involved in the decline of our hives, it’s important to keep a skeptical mindset but open to new innovations in honeybee care. Slava and Vera Strogolov think they’ve cracked the case: bees are digesting too many antibiotics. “We saw that…
What an amazing story about a relationship of cooperative hunting between two species: humans and the honeyguide. Scientists have determined that humans and their honeyguides communicate with each other through an extraordinary exchange of sounds and gestures, which are used only for honey hunting and…
Honeybees never cease to surprise me. There’s been a lot of study about their foraging habits on nectar and pollen, but very little done with honeybees and water storage. I highly recommend reading this article. After a day enduring hot and dry conditions, several dozen…
Hutchings, a fifth generation beekeeper who operates Debbee’s Bees, says the culprits got away with more than just her insects. “They had taken a bunch of my equipment and 10 big hives and the 16 nucs.” Nucleus colonies — or nucs — are small bee…
While foraging for food, insects detect floral scent molecules in the air. Wind currents can carry these molecules up to thousands of feet from their original source to where bees have their hives. “Many insects have nests that are up to 3,000 feet away from…
The hive of about 5,000 bees along with two varroa mites, which were detected on two of the bees, were destroyed by staff from the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources. Mr Weatherhead said testing will be done to see if the bees had any…
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…
