Bee News
Bee News 2
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Oct 06 The invasive predators, thought to have come from continental Europe, were found in September in Guildford, New Alresford and Brockenhurst. The two Hampshire nests have been destroyed. |
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Oct 05 "Colony collapse disorder" -- or massive die-offs of bees -- has caused international alarm in recent years, with experts blaming mites, viruses and pesticides for the phenomenon. |
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Oct 04 Devon Wildlife Trust said it had received messages from people who had destroyed nests they believed belonged to the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina) but which investigations showed actually belonged to the native European hornet (Vespa crabro), a “vital part” of the UK environment |
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Oct 03
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Sept 27 Pesky mosquitoes, disease-carrying ticks, crop-munching aphids and cockroaches are doing just fine. But the more beneficial flying insects of summer — native bees, moths, butterflies, ladybugs, lovebugs, mayflies and fireflies — appear to be less abundant. |
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Sept 25 |
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Sept 25 Aggregations of the larvae of Meloe franciscanus beetles lure male digger bees (genus Habropoda) with chemical signals that mimic female sex pheromones. The larvae, also known as triungulins, attach themselves to males, transfer to female bees during copulation and hitch a ride back to the nest, where they feed on bee eggs and provisions and emerge as adult beetles the following winter. |
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Sept 24 Protesters including Billy Bragg delivered a radical manifesto, co-edited by the broadcaster Chris Packham, to Downing Street. The manifesto called for an end to the “war on wildlife” following the decline of more than half of British species in recent decades. |
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Sept 24 |
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Sept 21 Dave Goulson is a British biologist actively working for the protection of the environment. He is a professor of Biology at the University of Sussex and has been widely recognised as one of the leading experts in subjects relating the decline of bees and the opportunities to overcome this circumstances. You can listen to the original audio here ... |
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Sept 21 |
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Sept 20 Erling Watt kept his colony on a farm just outside Peterhead, and was hoping to start making honey to fund his upcoming retirement. But when he went to check on the apiaries earlier this week, he discovered they were gone. |
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Sept 19 This apparent hate for wasps most likely stems from a lack of understanding among the public of the numerous ecological and economic benefits that they provide, according to researchers from University College London (UCL). |
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Sept 17 Colonies of European honeybees reproduce by releasing a queen from the nest accompanied by an entourage of colony workers. This swarm often attaches itself to the underside of a tree branch – taking on the shape of an inverted cone with the queen safely at the centre – while scout bees search for a good place to build a new nest. Journal reference: Nature Physics, Collective mechanical adaptation of honeybee swarms |
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Sept 17 The head of a botanical garden in Nantes, western France, says the pitcher plant Sarracenia devours Asian hornets - but not European hornets. Nor does it eat bees or wasps. |
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Sept 16 I sit down and look over a wildflower patch I’ve sown. It is pretty colourful – plenty of flowers, plenty of nectar – but I realise there is not much buzzing going on. There are no bees, no hoverflies, no butterflies flitting – in fact I haven’t seen a butterfly all morning. I get up and go searching but I find nothing. Not a tortoiseshell, peacock, or even a cabbage white. |
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Sept 13 But recent evidence suggests that human activity—including land development, electromagnetic pollution, and use of neonicotinoid pesticides—is making it even harder for honeybees to reproduce, to the peril of the species. Drones exposed to field-realistic concentrations of neonicotinoids produced 39 percent less living sperm—and more often deliver “dead sperm” to virgin queens. |
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Sept 11 The National Bee Unit has called for the public to report any suspected Asian hornets after two further confirmed sightings in Liskeard, Cornwall and Hull, east Yorkshire. At this stage, there is no evidence to suggest the Cornwall and Hull sightings are linked. |
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Sept 11 Our investigation has uncovered widespread use of the nicotine-based insecticide, acetamiprid, by the forestry industry, provoking concerns from experts and alarm from environmentalists who fear “creeping degradation” of nature. |
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Sept 08 |
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Sept 08 While scientists around the globe have been sounding alarm bells over the decline of bees and pollinators crucial to the growth of crops, the diversity of wild bee and honeybee species in the Dutch capital has increased by 45 percent since 2000 |
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Sept 08 Honey has been classified by the European Commission as sixth on the list of the most endangered counterfeited food items, Andrej Kandolf Borovsak from the Slovenian Beekeeping Association said during the Economic Forum in Krynica in southern Poland. Honey is usually faked with the addition of sugar, molasses, potato syrup or sugar syrup, " all much cheaper than real honey, and the ordinary consumer is not able to taste the difference" |
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Sept 07 A “perfect storm” of intensive farming and rising badger populations has left most of the countryside in England and Wales devoid of hedgehogs, according to the first systematic national survey. The research used footprints left by hedgehogs in special tunnels to reveal that they were living at just 20% of the 261 sites surveyed. |
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Sept 06 |
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Sept 06 Up to now some 365 beehives have been counted in 18 apiaries within a radius of 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the field of habanero peppers, which could be why the beekeepers are losing their main source of income. |
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Sept 06 The insect, an Asian hornet, was spotted in the Fowey area, and work is under way to track down and destroy its nest. Bee inspectors are visiting local beekeepers and setting up monitoring traps. The National Bee Unit confirmed the sighting yesterday. |
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Sept 01 The move to ban the five so-called neonicotinoids has been hailed by beekeepers and environmentalists, but cereal and sugar beet farmers warn it could leave them all but defenceless in protecting valuable crops against other harmful insects. |
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Aug 31 |
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Aug 31 The ban will extend to seven neurotoxic insecticides - acetamiprid, clothianidin, imidacloprid, thiacloprid, thiamethoxam, nitenpyram and dinotefuran - and is designed to protect declining bee numbers and resultant crop failure. |
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Aug 30 The experimental return to “strip-field farming” close to the spectacular Rhossili Bay on the Gower peninsula in south Wales is being credited with a threefold increase in the number of species of wildflowers and the appearance of rare birds such as the hen harrier and grasshopper warbler |
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Aug 30 |
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Aug 30 In experiments, researchers showed that bees initially put off by sugar water containing neonicotinoids – the most widely-used class of insecticide worldwide – soon started seeking them out to the exclusion of untainted food. |
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Aug 30 The Scottish Bee Company has taken on gardener Katie Warwick little more than six months after it was launched |
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Aug 26 Made from a mixture of cow milk and either sheep or goat milk, the cheese filled a broken clay jar unearthed from a 13th century B.C. tomb for Ptahmes, the mayor of the ancient city of Memphis. As you are probably aware, cheese and honey are often paired to make a delicate snack that’s far better than either alone. So we asked Honey Connoisseur Marina Marchese, President of the American Honey Tasting Society, what the perfect honey would be to pair with this very old piece of cheese. Her response … |
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Aug 24 In new draft guidance published by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and Public Health England (PHE), experts stress the fact that coughs can be easily treated in just a few weeks without the need for antibiotics prescribed by a GP. |
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Aug 23 Queen and worker honeybees are almost genetically identical but are fed a different diet as larvae. The researchers have found that specific protein patterns on their genome play an important role in determining which one they develop into. |
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Aug 17 Britain’s eight types of ‘social’ wasps – and 230 anti-social ones ... There are eight British members of the Vespidae family that are social wasps (many humans would say they’re all anti-social) – that eight includes the formidable hornet. In addition, we have 230 related types of solitary wasp, including the potter, mason and redoubtable beewolf. Social wasps inhabit colonies and are sometimes known as ‘jaspers’ (from vespa). They will be at their peak activity in mid-to-late August. |
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Aug 16 It was hoped that sulfoxaflor would provide an alternative to neonicotinoids, which have been shown to drastically reduce bee numbers, and is currently under review for licencing in Britain. But researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London found exposure to the new pesticide reduced both the size of bumblebee colonies and the number of offspring produced by 54 per cent. |
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Aug 16 When a queen suddenly dies, workers must select a group of larvae to raise as emergency queens, so the question arises whether workers tend to select larvae of their own subfamily over those of others, thus promoting their own genes at the expense of those from other subfamilies. |
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Aug 12 That’s the conclusion of our study, the first systematic examination of pollen contained within Australian honey. We collaborated with two major honey retailers to survey the pollen content of a large number of unprocessed honey samples. We found that a unique mix of native flora gives Australian honey a distinctive pollen signature. |
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Aug 11 Despite a world population of between 80 million and 100 million domesticated hives, each containing 10,000 to 60,000 bees, numbers are dwindling dramatically: one-third of the UK’s bee population has disappeared over the past decade and 24 per cent of Europe’s bumblebees are now threatened with extinction. |
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Aug 11 |
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Aug 08 A study has found that the behaviour of invasive plants changes over time – meaning plants of the same species act differently if they arrive in their new environment at separate times. Scientists studied the characteristics of monkeyflowers (Mimulus guttatus), which first arrived in the UK from North America 200 years ago. They compared the behaviour of monkeyflowers long-established in Scotland with those introduced recently for the purposes of the experiment. |
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Aug 04 The city's proud emblem has had a colourful makeover - 101 of them to be exact - as part of the Bee in the City trail. The public art spectacle will see brightly painted honeybee sculptures pop up all over the city and surrounding suburbs this summer for visitors to admire, each featuring a unique design created by local artists and community groups. |
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Aug 04 Honeybees fan their wings to cool down their hives when temperatures rise, but a new study shows that an individual honeybee's fanning behavior influences individual and group fanning behavior in hive-mates. |
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Aug 04 This abrupt change in policy, announced via a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service internal memorandum, revokes the agency’s 2014 policy prohibiting the use of toxic “neonic” insecticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on refuges. The 2014 ban was promulgated in response to a series of lawsuits challenging the use of genetically modified seed and broad-scale application of toxic pesticides on refuges for violating environmental laws. |
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Aug 03 A team of researchers including three graduate students at the University of Arizona discovered that while worker bees and queens can be genetically identical, their vastly different lifespans appear to be connected to different microbes living in their guts. |
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Aug 03 Here’s how the Ceropegia flowers work, and it’s quite complicated. Spiders and other insect predators often trap and eat honeybees, and there are some flies that love to eat these honeybees, too. The flies are able to smell the scent of the dying honeybees, and congregate to feed off the bees even as the predators are eating them. Since they are, in this sense, robbing the predators, they are called “kleptoparasites”, that is, those that live off other creatures by stealing their food. |
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Aug 03 The authors of the study say it is the first of its kind to highlight the risk to bees in urban areas posed by garden use of pesticides. The study sampled pollen and nectar from bumblebee colonies in rural and peri-urban habitats in three UK regions–Stirlingshire, Hertfordshire, and Sussex over three years. |