News about bees and beekeeping from around the world
Number of news: 760 and counting
An enhanced-line honey bee stock developed by University of California, Davis bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey, that crosses her bee line “New World Carnolians” with “Old World” Carnolians from Germany, shows genetic promise in aiding the troubled bee industry, research reveals.
Honeybees are clever little creatures. They can form abstract concepts, such as symmetry versus asymmetry, and they use symbolic language - the celebrated waggle dance - to direct their hivemates to flower patches. New reports suggest that they can also communicate across species, and can count - up to a point.
How could bees of little brain come up with anything as complex as a dance language? The answer could lie not in biology but in six-dimensional math and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.
The Queensland Minister for Tourism Regional Development and Industry,
Desley Boyle today opened The University of Queensland’s new $2.5
million “All Weather Bee Flight Facility” at the Queensland
Brain Institute.
The Buzz reported Friday that beekeepers nationally are continuing to lose an alarming percentage of the bees they use to commercially pollinate crops.
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One Arizona-based company, however, says it has a solution. MegaBee: The Tucson Bee Diet is a protein, vitamin and mineral supplement that promises to improve honeybee health.
Fuentes, whose study was published in the Journal of Atmospheric Environment, used mathematical models to estimate how far fragrance molecules could travel. Fuentes and his team concluded that scent trails traveled up to 1,200 meters in pre-industrial times. Today, those same scents may waft for only up to 300 meters in urban pollution before bonding with ozone and other pollutants and losing their punch.
University of California Davis bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey and Steve Sheppard, a professor and apiculturist at Washington State University, Pullman, Wash., are investigating several races of the Western or European honey bee (Apis mellifera), which European settlers brought to America in 1622.
For decades, a divisive debate has raged among biologists over the evolution of eusocial insects—those that thrive in cooperative societies of queens, workers and drones
Some beekeepers buy Italian bees or Russian bees — each type having its own attributes. Kelton said the bees that seem to have the strongest resistance to disease, however, are wild, mixed-breed bees.
University of California Davis bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey and Steve Sheppard, a professor and apiculturist at Washington State University, Pullman, Wash., are investigating several races of the Western or European honey bee (Apis mellifera), which European settlers brought to America in 1622.