More than Honey

Because pollen sucks. It does! But if you prefer the smart word: it’s hygroscopic. It attracts water. And where is water, there is rot. Which is a problem when you are an insect that relies on pollen to feed its brood and therefore needs to store pollen for weeks, if not months. You may be [...]

While the bees are having a few more quiet weeks of heating and eating, we certainly don’t! Almond blossom in California is approaching rapidly and we are busy aligning beekeepers and brokers and almond growers and solitary bee experiments and drivers and helicopters and what not. If it all works out, it will be great. [...]

While the honeybees were fine there was little interest in pollinators and pollination in general. People just took it for granted. But with the ongoing news about CCD and concerns about declining bee populations worldwide the interest in wild bees as natural pollinators and “backup” for honeybee pollination has risen sharply. It turned out, however, [...]

Just quickly: I am so delighted about this new piece of research about how bumble-bees perceive colour patterns, that I don’t want to miss the opportunity to share it. The study has been conducted by 25 children from Blackawton Elementary School (!) and was published this week in the scientific journal Biology Letters from the [...]

As I wrote before, we are trying to get our heads around a few things related to bees and social insects in general. One of them is the concept of the Superorganism (which somehow seems to be much more readily embraced in popular culture than among biologists). Two prominent proponents of the superorganism-concept are Bert [...]

While the bees have done the smart thing and huddled up for winter, we are wide awake and using the snowy days for catching up on reading and working on the “wider picture”. There is a lot about bees that is interesting, and the more we study them, the more we keep encountering new and [...]

Canada and the US have about 50 species of native bumblebees. For five of them, a rapid decline has been observed since the 1990s. Three species — Bombus affinis, B. terricola, and B. occidentalis — will now be submitted to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species (cf NatureNews: [...]

Vespa orientalis (Photo: Stanislav Krejčík) This is straight from New Scientist’s Zoologger. It’s not a bee, but a great little beast nonetheless: “Oriental hornets live in underground colonies. (…) It has been known since the late 1960s that these insects are much more active in the middle of the day, unlike other wasps which tend [...]

Bees navigate by the sun and to be able to do so, they need to measure time (a problem humans were confronted with too, and one that took a lot of time and ingenuity to solve as the arduous History of Longitude shows). If bees want to fly to the same location in the morning [...]

I was putting together a list of the coverage of and comments on the recent paper by Bromenshenk et al. in PLoS ONE on new insights concerning the causes of CCD and I thought I might as well put the list up here, too. So, in no particular order: The original paper: Iridovirus and Microsporidian [...]