6
POPSBeekeepers Tell Pesticide Firm to Buzz Off This is absurd! As Graham White, a beekeeper in the Scottish Borders and an environmental author states: "Putting Syngenta in charge of UK research into the causes of honeybee deaths is arguably the equivalent of putting the tobacco companies in charge of research into lung cancer." It’s a foregone conclusion that Syngenta will find that they are not responsible for the decline in bee population. This is a clear case of government in the back pocket of another corporation. And once again, the public is powerless to have any effect on stopping this travesty and government just rubs our noses in the fact.
0
POPSbees dying Whoa, this is bad, really bad. think about what this could mean for our food and everything.
9
POPSLife Without Bumblebees? It's Not Just Honeybees That Are Mysteriously Dying The decline of bumblebees has received far less attention, though in the public imagination their plight has often been conflated with that of the honeybee. Not only do bumblebees pollinate about 15 percent of our food crops (valued at $3 billion), they also occupy a critical role as native pollinators. Plant pollinator interactions can be so specific and thus the loss of even one species carries with it potentially severe ecological consequences. As E. O. Wilson writes, "If the last pollinator species adapted to a plant is erased … the plant will soon follow." The cause: "the rise of the commercial bumblebee rearing industry in the early 1990s, largely for greenhouse tomato pollination. Captive bees, they say, played a key role in spreading disease, which has led to the decline of several North American species, all of which belong to the same subgenus."
5
POPSHoney Bees, Hives, Propolis & Social Immunity
In experiments funded by the US National Science Foundation, Simone's team painted the inside walls of hives with an extract of propolis collected from Brazil or Minnesota. This inside layer mimicked how propolis or resins would be distributed in a feral colony nesting in a tree cavity. They then created colonies of honeybees and housed either in hives enriched with resin, or hives without the resin layer - to act as a control. After one week of exposure they collected bees that had been born in each colony. Honeybee propolis Propolis is a mixture of resins and wax Genetic tests on these 7-day-old bees showed that those growing in the resin-rich colonies had less active immune systems. "The resins likely inhibited bacterial growth. Therefore the bees did not have to activate their immune systems as much," said Simone. "Our finding that propolis in the nest allows bees to invest less in their immune systems after such a short exposure was surprising. Resins in the hive
21
POPSSneaky Orchid Drives Wasps Wild A study in the journal Current Biology finds that an orchid mimics the alarm chemical signal of bees to attract the bees' predatory wasps, all to get the wasps to pollinate the orchids.
5
POPSCocaine Turns Honeybees Into Liars There is a vid at the source showing an experiment which illustrates the role and accuracy of the bee waggle or dance on return to the nest. Great communication. Now to decode it.
5
POPSBees buzz parked plane in Beverly Wilkins said the windy day may have forced the swarm down as it came across the airport. The queen, who is not used to flying long distances, may have stopped to rest, and the other bees congregated around to protect her. The bees usually have a destination picked out in advance. Wilkins, the past president of the Essex County Bee Association, and his wife, Linda, live on Mill Street in Middleton, and in April their hives were plundered by a black bear. A motion-activated camera captured an image of the bear milling about their backyard. It destroyed about eight hives, costing them hundreds of dollars. "This is replacing the hives (the bear) ate," Wilkins said of the bees he picked up in Danvers.
9
POPS A Cure For Honey Bee Colony Collapse? The loss of honey bees could have an enormous horticultural and economic impact worldwide. Honeybees are important pollinators of crops, fruit and wild flowers and are indispensable for a sustainable and profitable agriculture as well as for the maintenance of the non-agricultural ecosystem. Honeybees are attacked by numerous pathogens including viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites. For most of these diseases, the molecular pathogenesis is poorly understood, hampering the development of new ways to prevent and combat honeybee diseases. So, any progress made in identifying causes and subsequent treatments of honey bee colony collapse is invaluable. "Now that we know one strain of parasite that could be responsible, we can look for signs of infection and treat any infected colonies before the infection spreads" said Dr Higes, principle researcher.
9
POPSThe Wild Side "Instead we are killing them off in their billions through our befouling of their environment. The honeybee brain has only a million or so neurons, several orders of magnitude less than ours. It is a moot point as to whether humans or honeybees make the best use of their neuronal resource."
30
POPSSolving the Mystery of the Vanishing Bees This is a fascinating story. It is not the life of bees which is fascinating, but the vast complexity and interconectedness of life it exposes. From humans to beehives to plants to microbes, fungi, viruses, genes, metagenomics and what not. All are partaking in one orchestrated intelligent whole. This is a must read
0
POPSBeeKeeping Beginners - Why HoneyBees are the ones to keep Honey bees the most well-known, popular and economically beneficial insects. For thousands of years, man has plundered honey beehive colonies to get honey, bee larvae and beeswax. Now, honey bees are commonly kept in artificial hives throughout the United States either on large commercial bee farms or hobbyists who have only a few hives and who simply enjoy working with these fascinating insects.
0
POPSBeekeeping Beginners - How Do Bees Make Honey? The first thing Honeybees do is Gather the Nectar. The Field bees which are the older bees leave the colony to gather nectar from any plant that has flowers. Nectar is comprised of a approximately 80% water and it also contains complex sugars that is produced by flowers.
4
POPSWAKE UP PEOPLE! Maybe it's time we do as Lydia Lunch says. "It's time to quit your crying and embrace the beginning of the End Times. Let's F***ing Rock!
6
POPSA list of the pork in the "stimulus plan" $448 million for constructing a new Homeland Security Department headquarters $600 million to convert the federal auto fleet to hybrids $450 million for NASA (carve-out for “climate-research missions”) $600 million for NOAA (carve-out for “climate modeling”) $1 billion for the Census Bureau $89 billion for Medicaid $30 billion for COBRA insurance extension $36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits $20 billion for food stamps $4.5 billion for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers $850 million for Amtrak $87 million for a polar icebreaking ship $1.7 billion for the National Park System $55 million for Historic Preservation Fund $7.6 billion for “rural community advancement programs” $150 million for agricultural-commodity purchases $150 million for “producers of livestock, honeybees, and farm-raised fish”
7
POPSHoneybees As Plant 'Bodyguards' I always have bees in my little yard and am not troubled by caterpillars. Wasps help. Wish they worked with slugs. I'm sick of drunk slugs. They are supposed to drown in the beer, not party.
6
POPS"Bees Can Count" continues: Also at the Australian National University, Marie Dacke and Mandyam V. Srinivasan trained European honeybees to pass a particular number of colored stripes in a tunnel to get a food reward, which was placed by a stripe. When they removed the food, the bees still returned to the same stripe. Next, they mixed things up on the bees: they varied the spacing of the stripes, and even replaced stripes with unfamiliar markers. The insects consistently passed the same number of markers to approach the former reward site, demonstrating that they could count, up to four. The studies burnish the impressive list of honeybees' known cognitive abilities, all achieved with a brain the size of a sand grain. The studies were detailed in the journals PLoS One and Animal Cognition.
2
Pops
Newest Clips
Latest Comments
Most Pops
Print
Save
Turn on live update