July 2023

Breeding, Bees, and the 4 Ps Posted by Scott Elliott, ARS Office of Communications in Research and Science After suffering severe winter losses beginning in 2007, the honey bee population is making a comeback. Still, losses are high, which means beekeepers have to spend a lot of time and money replacing their bees. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Agricultural Research…

Emergency assistance to honeybee producers averaged $45 million annually from 2020–22 Honeybee health and honey production are impacted by extreme weather events. In recent years, droughts in the western and northern Great Plains regions have decreased floral resources on which commercial honeybees typically forage. Elsewhere, hurricanes and heavy rains in some southern States damaged and destroyed forage, in some cases…

Pollinator Grants Offered to High Schools Sand County Foundation is now accepting applications from high school teachers for pollinator habitat grants. This competitive grant program gives Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin high school students hands-on experience growing native wildflowers and establishing habitat for imperiled insect pollinators and monarch butterflies. Successful applications will receive prairie seeds and seedlings, consultation, and…

NP 305 Research Components NP 305, Crop Production, focuses on the most critical issues and needs of U.S. production agriculture. It comprises two major Research Components: (1) Integrated Sustainable Crop Production Systems and (2) Bees and Pollination. Component 1. Integrated Sustainable Crop Production Systems This component encompasses ARS efforts to improve existing and develop new production systems for current and…

Photo credit: Tina Sebestyen By: Tina Sebestyen In my May article, Control Swarming Without Splitting, I mentioned the benefits of re-queening colonies in July. To quickly re-cap, colonies that receive a ripe queen cell or mated queen in mid-July enter Winter with a cluster that has 3,000 more fat Winter bees, and similarly lower numbers of Summer bees that can’t…