News about bees and beekeeping from around the world
Number of news: 760 and counting
Oxfordshire firm Rowse Honey has put up £100,000 for research into why there is a worldwide shortage of honey bees and into the diseases which are killing them.
Beekeepers swarmed Parliament and the prime minister’s office on Wednesday, demanding more funds for research after the number of Britain’s honey bees dropped by nearly a third in the past year.
Hundreds of members of the British Beekeepers’ Association (BBKA) from all over the country will deliver a petition to No 10 signed by more than 140,000 members of the public, calling for an immediate increase in research funding – from what the BBKA terms the “paltry” £200,000 currently spent annually on bee health research, to £1.6m annually for the next five years.
Home-produced honey could run out by Christmas because of a fall in the UK bee population, experts have warned.
The Soil Association has urged the government to ban pesticides linked to honeybee deaths around the world.
Beekeepers in the United Kingdom have warned that the country’s honeybee population could be all but wiped out within 10 years, unless the government allocates £8 million ($16 million) to fund research into identifying and eliminating threats to the industry.
Anti-freeze spraying vandals have been branded morons after killing thousands of bees in three strikes against the same hive in Torquay.
Fledgling beekeeper Mieko Mitchell has been devastated by the hat-trick of callous attacks on her newly-established colony at a secret location in St Marychurch.
Honeybees are being killed off in huge numbers by parasites, threatening the crucial pollination of crops. A record one in three of the 240,000 hives in Britain did not survive the spring and the main culprit is the varroa mite.
WALES’ ailing honeybee population is being given artificial insemination after a second successive washout summer which has seen numbers fall to dangerously low levels.
Britain’s honeybees have suffered catastrophic losses this year, according to a survey of the nation’s beekeepers, contributing to a shortage of honey and putting at risk the pollination of fruits and vegetables.