Bee News
Bee News 4
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Oct 26 The aim of the project is to ensure pollinators, such a honey bees, receive a steady supply of food resources, which will in turn support crop yields |
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Oct 19 Cyantraniliprole is a systemic insecticide that works by affecting muscles in insects and eventually leads to death. This unusual mode of action means that it is effective against some pests that have become resistant to other classes of insecticide. |
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Oct 18 Bayer CropScience, which manufactures clothianidin, carried out a series of large-scale landscape studies into the bee safety of the neonicotinoid in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, a state in northern Germany. |
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Oct 17 The bee is common in the UK’s European neighbours but has been discovered for the first time in this country, in a small park in Greenwich, London. “I always have half an eye open, but I certainly didn’t expect that,” said David Notton, an insect expert at the Natural History Museum, who made the discovery in June. “It’s quite a big bee, so, if it was new, I thought someone else would have already spotted it.” DNA tests confirmed the identity of the bee - Hoplitis adunca - and Notton gave it a common name based on the plant it exclusively feeds on, a blue-flowering plant in the borage family called viper’s bugloss. |
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Oct 15 View the new "Bee Health" infograph. |
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Oct 10 Despite a warm summer that would normally help them thrive, the majority of species studied in the annual Big Butterfly Count saw populations fall. |
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Oct 07 Scientists from Aarhus University have teamed up with American and German colleagues and found that the mating behaviour of queen bees increases the risk of the whole colony succumbing to the syndrome Colony Collapse Disorder because of a venereal disease. In order to understand how this works you need to know a few things about the mating behaviour of bees. |
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Oct 05 For example, if shown a picture of a lion on a tree, people would be more likely to point out the lion, and ignore the tree. This bias against plants is widespread, and seriously limits conservation efforts, scientists say. |
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Oct 03 They apply chemical growth regulators that change the balance of plant hormones to control the height and strength of the grain’s stem. They spray against aphids and mildew. And then they often spray again just before harvesting with the herbicide glyphosate to dessicate the crop, which saves them the energy costs of mechanical drying. |
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Sept 29 Pesticide manufacturers have spent millions influencing researchers who are investigating the role of neonicotinoids, a nicotine-like chemical found in many major pesticides, in bee die-offs, according to a recent analysis by Greenpeace. The analysis arrives just weeks after scientists released the results of a long-term study that shows neonicotinoids are extremely dangerous to wild bees in the United Kingdom. |
Sept 26
Around the world, honeybee populations have been rapidly declining. Although there is an overwhelming amount of scientific research that proves the cause for this decline is due to the widespread use of systemic pesticides called neonicotinoids, industry claims that these pesticides are NOT the root of the problem. |
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Sept 23 The research, conducted by Syngenta and Bayer on their neonicotinoid insecticides, were submitted to the US Environmental Protection Agency and obtained by Greenpeace after a freedom of information request. |
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Sept 22 So said eminent biological philosopher and author E.O. Wilson, not coincidentally, an entomologist who specializes in ants. Also not coincidentally, the aphorism recently resurfaced in a 2014 book by fellow biologist and author Dave Goulson, the world's foremost expert on the behaviour, ecology and conservation of bumblebees. In A Buzz in the Meadow, Goulson's compelling ode to the importance of insects, Wilson's quote is a springboard both to declare that insects are vanishing worldwide, and to question our lack of concern. Goulson contrasts the ramifications of no insects — potential global cataclysm — with something of far less consequence on which we expend much conservation capital: the ever-lovable panda, whose disappearance, while symbolic, might mean only "a tiny bit more bamboo in a forest in China." |
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Sept 21 |
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Sept 21 The hornets eat honeybees and have become widespread in central and southern France, prompting warnings in recent years that they could arrive in the UK via potted plants from France. |
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Sept 21 “We are interested in the social physiology of honey bee colonies, that is, how they work as physiological units”, says Thomas Seeley, from Cornell University, USA, who was curious how the elderly bees that are tasked with gathering water know when the colony’s collective thirst is running high. “Water collectors do not spend much, if any, time in the broodnest, and yet somehow they know when to start collecting water to control its temperature”, explains Seeley. |
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Sept 20 The European Academies Science Advisory Council, an independent body composed of representatives from the national science academies of European Union member states, has a growing body of evidence that shows the widespread use of the pesticides “has severe effects on a range of organisms that provide ecosystem services like pollination and natural pest control, as well as on biodiversity.” |
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Sept 15 |
Study: Scientists That Won’t Link Pesticides To Bee Deaths Are Often Funded By Agrochemical Industry
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Sept 14 Pesticide manufacturers have spent millions influencing researchers who are investigating the role of neonicotinoids, a nicotine-like chemical found in many major pesticides, in bee die-offs, according to a recent analysis by Greenpeace. The analysis arrives just weeks after scientists released the results of a long-term study that shows neonicotinoids are extremely dangerous to wild bees in the United Kingdom. Bayer and Syngenta, two of the world’s top manufacturers of neonicotinoid-based pesticides, gave over £2 million (over $2.6 million) to British universities engaged in research on pesticides and plant sciences between 2011 and the start of 2016 |
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Sept 14 Could these bees have made the same sandstone nests he had observed nearly a year before at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Park in Utah? |
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Sept 14 Our results demonstrate that deformed wing virus infected drones are competitive to mate and able to transmit the virus along with semen, which occasionally leads to queen infections. Virus transmission to queens during mating may be common and can contribute noticeably to queen failure. |
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Sept 10 Queen bees in colonies that were fed imidacloprid-laced syrup laid substantially fewer eggs - between one-third and two-thirds as many, depending on the dose of imidacloprid - than queens in unexposed colonies, the study reported. |
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Sept 08 The comments come as Energydesk reveals that Bayer and Syngenta have given more than £2 million to UK universities for research related to pesticides and plant sciences between 2011 to the start of 2016. The data could add to concerns that universities will become more dependent on industry funding as new EU science backing is cut back. |
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Sept 02 On Sunday morning, the South Carolina honey bees began to die in massive numbers. The pattern matched acute pesticide poisoning. By one estimate, at a single apiary — Flowertown Bee Farm and Supply, in Summerville — 46 hives died on the spot, totalling about 2.5 million bees |
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Aug 31 Full text can bee seen here |
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Aug 29 For the rest of this Plos One article, click HERE |
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Aug 23 The prized honey originates from New Zealand, yet demand is so high that supply cannot keep up. The net result is that some producers appear to be substituting cheap standard honey. |
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Aug 19 The new study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, examines the question of whether the use of a common (and highly controversial) class of pesticides called neonicotinoids can be linked to wild bee declines in England. The results suggest that this could be the case. Using 18 years of data collected on more than 60 bee species in England, the researchers found that species foraging on pesticide-treated crops have experienced much more severe losses than species foraging on other plants. The study provides some of the first evidence that the effects of neonicotinoid exposure can scale up to cause major damage to bees. |
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Aug 18 In a study published in the journal Biology Letters, researchers led by biologist Matthew Forister of the University of Nevada tracked butterfly populations across four decades in three Northern California counties. Butterflies there face many challenges, including climate change, drought, and habitat loss to agriculture and urban sprawl. Yet even with those factors accounted for, neonicotinoids seem to pose a unique threat: the researchers found that declines in butterfly health and reproductive success accelerated dramatically after the pesticides entered widespread use in the mid-1990s. |
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Aug 17 |
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Aug 17 The scientists found evidence suggesting that neonicotinoid use is linked to large-scale and long-term decline in wild bee species distributions and communities. The decline was, on average, three times stronger among species that regularly feed on the crop such as Buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) compared to species that forage on a range of floral resources, indicating that oilseed rape is a principle mechanism of neonicotinoid exposure among wild bee communities. |