#Best Rx for Bees? Their Own Honey Honey contains chemicals that could help bees ward off parasites
and protect them from pesticide damage new research suggests. The findings published today (April 29) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest that the immune-boosting chemicals in honey could be a solution to colony-collapse disorder
which has decimated bee populations worldwide. The natural honey has components in it that help trigger defenses in the bees said Jay Evans a bee pathologist at the U s. Department of agriculture's Agricultural research service in Maryland who was involved not in the study.
Mysterious disappearance Honeybees have been disappearing mysteriously in a trend known as colony-collapse disorder. Though no one knows exactly what causes the dramatic die-off scientists think a range of factors including parasites
and pesticides may be culprits. Beekeepers often feed bees to get them safely through the winter.
Honey may be ideal but corn syrup is cheaper so most beekeepers feed bees artificial sweeteners Evans said.
On the Hunt: Honeybee Scouts Find Food To see whether honey provided any benefit to the bees May Berenbaum a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and her colleagues identified several chemicals in honey that could play a role in helping bees fight parasites and pesticides.
The researchers then took those chemicals added them to bee candy a combination of sucrose and powdered sugar and fed them to 15 worker bees.
Another group got bee candy without any special compounds added. The team then dissected the mid-gut
or small intestine of the bees to see which genes were activated. Bee immunity The bees that ate the honey chemicals showed activation in genes that are known to help bees fight parasites
and break down pesticides while those who ate the normal bee candy showed no such activation.
One particular chemical p-Coumaric acid in particular was tied to the gene activation. The findings suggest that honey isn't just providing bees with a quick source of fast food
but is also giving them compounds that keep them healthy. It also suggests a potential way to strengthen bee colonies.
P-Coumaric acid may ï nd use as an additive to honey substitutes to allow beekeepers to maintain colonies during food shortages without compromising the ability of their bees to defend themselves against the pesticides
and pathogens that currently bedevil beekeeping in the United states the researchers wrote in the paper.
That suggestion seems practical Evans said. I don't think we'll get beekeepers to go back to feeding their bees just honey.
But scientists should try supplementing the corn syrup with these compounds and hoping that replaces the good stuff in the honey Evans told Livescience.
Although this change alone may not prevent colony collapses anything that strengthens the bees could help Evans said.
Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter@tiaghose. Â Followâ Livescience@livescience Facebookâ & Google+.+Original article onâ Livescience. com
Hobbyists Swarm to Beekeeping Matt Howes would never have stuck his bare hand into a beehive six months ago
so that he could watch the bees from his desk one story below. Howes spends about an hour weekly on the roof of the Manhattan office of the Natural resources Defense Council where he is the director of online communications.
because it lets him observe urban wildlife he said as he pointed out a swallow dipping down to snatch a bee with the Empire state Building looming just a couple of blocks away.
Beekeeping was legalized in New york in 2010 after being banned in 1999 under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration.
and office beekeepers have registered hives with the New york city Department of health and the numbers continue to rise.
and while many bee enthusiasts appreciate this freedom to expand others worry that the city may eventually hit bee capacity
and run out of food sources for the bees. It takes one million flowers to produce enough nectar for one pound of honey said Andrew Cote founder of the New york city Beekeepers Association.
Each hive needs hundreds of pounds of honey to survive. To supplement what the bees forage from parks
and cracks in sidewalks many beekeepers provide their hives with bowls of sugar water. But Cote said he would rather see bees feed on wild more nutritious sources of nectar
and the burgeoning number of hives worries him. We have the same amount of flowers
and trees but more bees Cote said. While not everyone in New york's beekeeping community agrees the better-informed beekeepers do agree he said.
For now Cote said he hopes that educating the public about beekeeping the NYCBA will help New yorkers deal with their bees responsibly.
Howes who took beekeeping lessons from Cote regularly changes his bees'bucket of drinking water a requirement of the health department
and keeps a journal of his weekly hive checks to track any problems. Â This is purely a labor of love Howes said.
Elsewhere office hives have played more of a role in business. The Waldorf Astoria hotel for example uses its rooftop-made honey in cocktails salad dressing and even wild mushroom chowder.
We love having the honey executive chef David Garcelon told Livescience. Honey is such a versatile thing that you can use in so many dishes.
And it has a story behind it that we can share with guests many of whom can't believe that there are beehives in Manhattan.
Only 125 of the 1000 pounds of honey the Waldorf kitchen consumed last year came from the rooftop hives.
and spending time outdoors many beekeepers say the hobby has increased their sense of community in the busy city.
Keeping bees is an equalizer among people with different social and political views said Alex Batkin a poetry graduate student at Brooklyn College who recently joined a group that helps Cote check hives each week.
Opposing viewpoints somehow don't translate into beekeeping he said. It crosses many lines and I think that is a great thing.
#Caffeine Gives Bees a Memory Boost Honeybees like tired office employees like their caffeine suggests a new study finding that bees are more likely to remember plants containing the java ingredient.
Bees that fed on caffeinated nectar were three times more likely to remember a flower's scent than bees fed sugar alone.
Remembering floral traits is difficult for bees to perform at a fast pace as they fly from flower to flower
and we have found that caffeine helps the bee remember where the flowers are study leader Geraldine Wright a neuroethologist at Newcastle University UK said in a statement.
Caffeine in nectarâ is likely to improve the bee's foraging prowess while providing the plant with a more faithful pollinator Wright added.
Fortunately for the bees the caffeine levels are below the threshold that they can taste
Next the researchers used a form of Pavlovian conditioning to test how the caffeine affected the bees'memory.
Bees have a reflex where they stick out their mouth parts when they encounter something sweet.
The scientists trained the bees to extend their mouths in response to a floral scent
or sugar containing different levels of added caffeine Caffeine had a strong effect on the bees'memory.
Even 24 hours later three times as many bees remembered the scent that was paired with a caffeine reward as the plain sugar.
Twice as many bees remembered the flowers'scent after three days. I think it's the first example of nature manipulating memory in an animal neuroscientist Serena Dudek of the National institutes of health who was involved not in the study told Livescience.
but as an advantage in getting bees to remember better. In mammals caffeine has been shown to affect circuits in the brain's memory center the hippocampus.
Wright and colleagues think the caffeine is affecting neurons in the bees'brains in a way that reinforces memories.
</a p><p></p><p>Honeybees like tired office employees like their caffeine suggests a new study finding that bees are more likely to remember plants containing the java ingredient.</
Bees that fed on caffeinated nectar were three times more likely to remember a flower's scent than bees fed sugar alone.
<a href=http://www. livescience. com/27722-caffeine-gives-bees-memory-boost. html target=blank>Caffeine Gives Bees a Memory Boost</a p><p></p
It used to be thought that the pollinating insects such as bees and wasps evolved at about the same time as the angiosperms.
While the oldest bee fossil was trapped in its amber prison only about 80 million years ago evidence has been found that bee
and Bees Get Depressed (New world Library 2013). The views expressed are those of the author
For instance bees collect plant resins with antifungal and antimicrobial properties and bring it back to their hives to help them fight infection.
Beekeepers have selected against this trait since resin is sticky and hard to work with; this has made likely bees more prone to infection de Roode said.
These medicines could also possibly be used to fight infection in humans or other animals. One chemical in bee resin has been shown to have inhibitory effects against HIV-1 de Roode said.
Another plant eaten as a medicine by primates is now being used as an antiemetic (to treat nausea
#EU to Ban Certain Pesticides to Help Bees Bee populations are declining rapidly in Europe as they are in North america.
Some research suggests that neonicotinoid chemicals in pesticides could be partly to blame for the decline of bees.
They will now only be allowed for use on plants that aren't attractive to pollinators like bees the BBC reported.
Pollinators like bees fertilize about one-third of crops worldwide scientists estimate. In the United states the number of colonies has been reduced by about 50 percent in the last year alone according to news reports.
Fructose is a sugar that's found in fruits honey and some syrups. It's also a basic component in table sugar (sucrose)
In my new book Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed (New world Library 2013) I updated many of those essays more than 100 showcasing the fascinating cognitive abilities of other animals as well as their empathy compassion grief humor joy and love.
and bees get depressed just like people do. Melissa Bateson of Newcastle University and her colleagues have shown
When similar behavior is observed in vertebrates it's explained as having an emotional basis. The bees also showed altered levels of neurochemicals (dopamine serotonin
Given the right tools they have started businesses and sold canned salsa and honey and squash and eggs at farmer's markets.
and Bees Get Depressed (New world Library 2013). This essay is adapted from one that appeared in Bekoff's column Animal Emotions in Psychology Today.
his honey crop plummeted from 75 barrels to two. In short we have a new man-made water crisis etched atop the man-made crisis of climate change that produced the crisis we're running on empty.
#'Honey Laundering'an International Scandal, Experts Say There might be something funny in your honey.
Food safety experts have found that much of the honey sold in the United states isn't actually honey but a concoction of corn or rice syrup malt sweeteners or jiggery (cheap unrefined sugar) plus a small amount of genuine honey according to Wired UK.
Worse some honey much of which is imported from Asia has been found to contain toxins like lead and other heavy metals as well as drugs like chloramphenicol an antibiotic according to a Department of justice news release.
And because cheap honey from China was being dumped on the U s. market at artificially low prices Chinese honey is now subject to additional import duties So Chinese exporters simply ship their honey to Thailand
This international honey-laundering scandal has resulted now in a Justice department indictment of two U s. companies
This is the first admission by a U s. packer of knowingly importing mislabeled honey Eric Wenger chairman of True Source Honey told NPR.
True Source Honey is an industry consortium with an auditing system to guarantee the actual origin of honey.
But that same technology can be used to analyze the smoke given off by heated honey olive oil
A sample of honey for example can be matched to the flowers of a specific geographic region through the laser analysis. You will know in the case of olive oil
but you can create a counterfeit product that looks very similar using sugar instead of bees David Bell director of Protium (manufacturer of the isotope ratio-meter) told Wired UK.
#Honey Not a Contender in The Fight Against Superbugs (Op-Ed) This article was published originally atâ The Conversation.
whether applying medical grade honey to wound sites in patients undergoing dialysis showed advantages over standard antibiotic use.
They found that using honey showed no advantages over standard antibiotic use and was in fact worse for diabetic dialysis patients.
One such natural alternative is bee honey which has long been known to have antibacterial activity.
The Lancet paper looked closely at how a naturally-derived honey preparation compares against a clinically-approved antibiotic a drug called Bactroban that s used to kill bacteria found in and around wounds.
But for people with diabetes which is associated often with kidney disease the honey actually increased the risk of infection.
or nutrition though the search is complicated by the dozens of different chemical types that may be combining to contaminate the pollen bees collect for their hives.
So academic researchers from the University of Maryland and federal scientists from the Department of agriculture decided to collect pollen from seven major types of crops along the East Coast where CCD has been especially destructive where bees had been in serious decline
and fed the pollen to healthy bees. The collected pollen contained an average of nine types of pesticides
According to the study which appeared in the open-access journal PLOS One the researchers discovered healthy bees that ate the fungicides which are supposedly harmless to bees were actually three times more likely to become infected with a parasite that's known to cause CCD than bees
The study also indicated that there may not be a single cause of the collapse of bee colonies in North america the deaths may result from the impact of a complex web of chemicals spanning different types and classes of pesticides and fungicides.
and weren't expected to have an impact on healthy bees. Since the study has shown that bees eating such fungicides are much more likely to become infected with a deadly parasite USDA may need to change the way it regulates the use of those chemicals around crops
and the bee colonies that pollinate them and the agency may need to change the way it advises farmers and beekeepers about the fungicides'risks.
Likewise if CCD is linked to other components of the complex array of anthropogenic chemicals in pollen it will become even more difficult to protect bee colonies not to mention the other forms of life subjected to those chemicals as they spread through the food web and the broader environment.
To make things even more complicated in the recent study the researchers found that healthy bees they sampled had foraged mostly from weeds
and wildflowers not crops meaning that bees across North america are likely much more exposed to pesticides than previously thought.
More research is needed about how honey bees are exposed to pesticides outside the field in which they are placed the authors wrote in PLOS One.
We detected 35 different pesticides in the sample pollen and found high fungicide loads they added Our results highlight a need for research on sublethal effects of fungicides
and other chemicals that bees in an agricultural setting are exposed to. CCD isn't just about the bees food crops
and agriculture economies are affected too. Because bee populations are so low in the United states for example the surviving colonies are working overtime to pollinate crops in California and elsewhere.
More than $30 billion worth of crops in the United states could be seriously at risk if the continuing die off of honeybees were to reach critical levels.
While the researchers were careful not to directly link the complex web of pesticides found in the pollen samples directly to colony collapse disorder the inference is hard to ignore.
when bees are known to be pollinating but those regulations don't apply to the chemicals used to kill fungus on the crops as those substances were thought to be harmless to bees.
But there is one finding from the study that beekeepers should consider right away: simply looking at the types of chemicals used on crops may simply not be enough.
Our results show that beekeepers need to consider not only pesticide regimens of the fields in which they are placing their bees
but also spray programs near those fields that may contribute to pesticide drift onto weeds the authors wrote.
The bees in our study collected pollen from diverse sources often failing to collect any pollen from the target crop.
The study also points out what we don't know and need to study more closely.
and increasing evidence that pesticide blends harm bees the authors wrote there is a pressing need for further research on the mechanisms underlying pesticide-pesticide and pesticide-disease synergistic effects on honey
bee health. A version of this column appeared as Bee Colony Collapses Are More Complex Than We Thought on the blog At the Edge by Jeff Nesbit on U s. News & World Report.
His most recent Op-Ed was titled Can You Calculate the Impact of Cheating in Sports?.
Engineers in the U k. and China have taken a step forward by showing that the cells actually start off as circles molded by the shape of a bee's body and then flow into a hexagonal pattern seconds later.
People have speculated always how bees have formed these honeycombs said Bhushan Karihaloo an engineer at Cardiff University in the U k
some people believed the bees had an uncanny ability to measure angles. But it's actually much more mundane. 10 Amazing Things You Didn't Know About Animals Honeycomb up close Using a honeycomb grown at a research facility in Beijing the researchers were able to carefully ward off the bees
and photograph the bare honeycomb seconds after formation providing the first clear evidence that cells naturally start as circles.
By heating the cells the bees cause the wax to become molten and flow like lava.
The team still does not know exactly how the bees go about heating each cell and explored the mechanics of two plausible scenarios:
One in which the bees focus their heat only at points where neighboring cells touch (a total of six points per cell) and another in
which the bees heat the entire cell all at once. My own feeling is that nature tries to minimize energy spent and from that point of view
But on the other hand from the perspective of the bees they might just want to warm the whole thing
Building like bees The team calculated the amount of time each scenario should take and found that circular cells should morph into hexagons within six seconds
In their future work the researchers hope these time constraints will help them assess which mechanism the bees use.
Juergen Tautz a bee biologist in Germany who was involved not in the study does not believe that bees can direct their heat to specific points in a cell
We are more familiar with traditional reproduction as practiced by the birds and the bees. Code of Life:
#How to Land Safely on a Vertical surface, Bee-Style (Op-Ed) This article was published originally atâ The Conversation.
Nonetheless bees land perfectly without the benefits of humanlike cognition complex instrumentation and stereoscopic (3d) vision.
When landing on a horizontal surface honey bees use something called optic flow to determine their speed.
Optic flow allows bees (and us) to determine how quickly we are moving by the speed at
The same is true for a flying bee. But bees often need to land on vertical surfaces such as flower petals
in order to obtain pollen or nectar. How do they determine their speed when this type of optic flow is not available to them?
Baird and her colleagues trained free-flying bees to land on an experimental apparatus composed of a vertically oriented circular perspex disc with a tube in the middle connected to a sugar feeder.
Once the bees landed on the tube they could crawl through it to access the feeder.
The researchers videotaped the bees approaching the apparatus and analysed the speed and trajectory of the flight and landing.
They found that the closer the bee got to the target the slower she flew.
Bees slowed down at a more or less constant speed but only when presented with the checkerboard and concentric circle patterns.
When they approached the pie-slice pattern the bees didn t slow down until they almost hit the disc.
and concentric ring patterns appeared (to the bee) to expand as she approached the disc
Baird and her colleagues suspected that bees used the apparent expanding image to calibrate their speed by maintaining a constant speed of approach;
To test whether the bees were using the rate of apparent expansion of the image to calibrate their speeds the researchers used a familiar optical illusion.
Once Baird and colleagues determined that bees presented with a disc displaying a stationary spiral behaved as they did presented
and concentric ring patterns they proceeded to measure the bees approach speeds to rotating spirals.
When the spiral appeared to expand the bees slowed their approach as if they perceived that they were closer to the target than they were in reality.
When the spiral appeared to contract the bees sped up their approach; as if they perceived they were further away just as the researchers predicted.
Despite this Matrix-like disruption to the bees perception the bees managed to land on the vertical surface of the disc without crashing presumably
Bees use their perceived rate of expansion of the image of their landing surface in order to modulate their speed of approach allowing them to land safely on vertical surfaces.
Because Baird and colleagues investigated bee flight and landing one day we may be able to land remotely piloted aircraft on uneven vertical surfaces such as part of a collapsed building allowing us to locate potential survivors.
when he disturbed a pile of wood that contained a hive of the notoriously aggressive bees;
eight people have been killed by the bees since 1990 the Waco Tribune reports. You can't believe how bad they are.
me want to get out of this business Allen Miller owner of Bees Be gone who later destroyed the hive told the Tribune.
In a hive of ordinary European bees about 10 percent will attack if the hive is threatened
but with African bees all of them attack you. Eight to 10 stings per pound of body weight are considered lethal according to the Texas Agricultural extension Service.
In 1956 Warwick Kerr a honeybee geneticist with the University of SãO Paulo Brazil imported African bees (Apis mellifera scutellata) to study.
But a handful of the African bees escaped into the wild where they interbred with native bees to produce bees with traits primarily derived from their dominant African forbearers (traits of the more docile native bees tended to be recessive
Nature's 10 Biggest Pests The bees spread rapidly from Brazil and are now found throughout South and Central america.
If attacked run Though the bees aren't predatory they become very aggressive when defending their hive and minor disturbances like a lawn mower or a moving car even as far away as 100 feet (30 meters) can trigger an attack.
Old tires junk piles building eaves cement blocks upturned flower pots and even empty soda cans have been occupied by the bees according to the U s. Department of agriculture.
In the event of a bee attack victims are advised to run as fast as they can toward an enclosed area like a car or building;
even though some bees will follow most will be shut out. Protect your face and head as much as possible from stings by covering your head with a shirt or jacket.
And do not jump into water (such as a swimming pool) to escape the bees they will wait at the surface for their victim to come up for air according to Texas A&m University.
Rainfall over 55 inches distributed evenly throughout the year is almost a complete barrier to Africanized honey bee spread entomologist Josã D. Villa of the Honey Bee Breeding Genetics
While attacks by the bees remain very rare Miller told KCENTV. com that he's seen at least five cases of Africanized hives in the past month more than he usually sees all year.
They could hold the key to solving the problem of bee colony collapse disorder a deadly syndrome that's wiping out native bee populations throughout North america and Europe.
'Torres has witnessed also bees drinking turtle tears. Bees appear to annoy the turtles more than the butterflies perhaps due to their buzzing wings he said.
 The lack of salt in the region has driven other animals to exhibit unusual behaviors.
Bees buzz at just the right frequency to release pollen from tomatoes and other flowering plants.
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