Bee Culture

How can LEDs improve Bee Pollination in Greenhouses? Bees are an essential partner in helping pollinate our flowers, enabling healthy production of quality fruits in greenhouses and vertical farming. Picking the right light source is an important step in boosting the performance of pollinators. Below are three key ways in which LEDs improve bee pollination: Bees can see and navigate…

Even on Farms, Bees Look For a Balanced Diet ENTOMOLOGY TODAY A study of managed bumble bees and honey bees on a blueberry farm finds that most of the pollen they collect comes from other plants, suggesting that supplementing crops with a diversity of nearby plant types makes for healthier bees. Shown here are honey bee hives near blueberry fields.…

Urban Beekeeping: A Green Illusion? The Need for a Measured Approach to Regenerating Biodiversity in Cities NEWS PROVIDED BY 3Bee / Milan PRNewswire/ — Urban beekeeping is experiencing rapid growth. The romantic image of bees fluttering among skyscrapers, returning nature to paved cities, is quite appealing. A recent study by Nature has shown that “we found large increases in hives numbers across all cities from an average…

The UK government has approved a bee-threatening pesticide (Neo-Nic, thiamethoxam) in a potential breach of environmental law The UK government has recently approved the use of a pesticide known as Cruiser SB, despite it being in potential violation of environmental law. The approval was granted as an emergency authorisation for use on sugar beet crops in East Anglia. A threat…

Father of the Modern Hive By: John Gordon Sennett “Assigning myself to one branch of agriculture—beekeeping, I devoted my whole life, all my thoughts, all my attention to it.” —Petro Ivanovych Prokopovych Ukraine is a beekeeping nation and so it is apt that the Father of the Hive hails from there. Petro Prokopovych is recognized worldwide as the founder of…

How bees can monitor pollution for us: Everything from toxic metals to antimicrobial resistance by Mark Patrick Taylor, Kara Fry and Max M Gillings, The Conversation Credit: Shutterstock Our cities are complex places of work, industry and residential activities. This often makes it hard to pin down the spread of different contaminants throughout them. This can be a concern, especially given…

New study uses video to show honey bees switch feeding mechanisms as resource conditions vary by Stephanie Baum , Phys.org Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Within nature, the compatibility of animals’ feeding mechanisms with their food sources determines the breadth of available resources and how successfully the animals will feed. Those who feed on the nectar of flowers, such as honey…

Insect apocalypse By Steve Nicholls Generally unloved and disregarded, insects are in fact the most successful group of animals on Earth and have been for more than 400 million years. With a million described species (and a lot more still out there to find) and numbers measured in the quintillions, insects underpin almost all terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. But in…

Six Months on the Road: Inside the World of Migratory Beekeeping Emily Baron Cadloff Bees and other pollinators are a hardworking but often forgotten backbone of our food system. In order to get everywhere they need to be, beekeepers travel with hives for nearly half the year. Photography by Shutterstock Every spring, beekeepers across the country ready their hives for…

Queen Banks By: Clarence Collison Queen banking is the storage of queens individually in cages and placed in a colony to be cared for by worker bees. Northern California queen producers bank excess queens as seasonal demand subsides in the Summer to provide an on-demand supply to beekeepers. This study investigated the potential to bank honey bee queens indoors as…