The jug found in that grave contained only traces of honey suggesting that the occupant went to his grave with a jar of unadulterated mead.
because honey was expensive and scarce the researchers reported online Dec 23 in the Danish Journal of Archaeology.
With Mcgovern's help Dogfish Head recreated the Nordic grog in October 2013 using wheat berries honey and herbs.
Two dwarfs later murdered Kvasir and mixed his blood with honey creating a beverage that was said to confer wisdom and poetry onto the drinker.
and Bees Get Depressed (New world Library 2013). This Op-Ed is adapted from one that appeared in Bekoff's column Animal Emotions in Psychology Today.
As part of a current CSIRO project we are fitting tiny micro-sensors to 5000 bees in Tasmania as part of a world-first research program to monitor their movements and their environment.
Eating local honey helps relieve seasonal allergy symptoms. It's true that bees collect pollen from plants Costa said
and honey has pollens in it from the local area. But he said the wind-carried pollens from trees grasses
The pollen in bee honey comes from flowers and is very heavy and falls to the ground.
The newly constructed bee hotel at the University of New hampshire's Woodman Farm isn't much to look at with its cinder block floors
The bee hotel is at the center of the first-ever comprehensive study of New england's bee population.
The study led by researchers at the University of New hampshire's New hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station (NHAES) aims to assess the condition of the region's estimated 250 species of bees.
Gallery of the Cutest Bugs The study will establish the first complete diversity assessment of native bees in the region
The study called Sustainable Solutions to Problems Affecting Bee Health was launched to coincide with National Pollinator Week (June 16-22) an annual event sanctioned by the U s. Secretary of agriculture that highlights the urgent issue
and habitat preferences will be fundamental to future studies to ameliorate declining bee populations and to target species at risk Rehan said.
In addition to helping protect native bees in New england Rehan said the project is designed to raise awareness about how humans are affecting pollinator populations in the region as well as across other areas of the country.
Bees which play a critical role in the health of food crops and natural ecosystems have experienced rapid declines in population and diversity over the past several years research from NHAES shows.
Loss of habitat and agricultural environments as well as the widespread use of pesticides and chemicals in farming are believed to be contributing to the current bee crisis throughout the United states. The value of pollination to agriculture is estimated at more than $200 billion each year worldwide
said Rehan who oversees the University of New hampshire's Bee Lab. This makes the university's research into the subject even more pressing
and has led to the launch of a longer-term project to monitor the biodiversity of bees in New hampshire.
The bee hotel at Woodman Farm represents one part of this project with other monitoring sites at NHAES facilities also contributing much-needed data.
and changes in bee communities. The researchers plan to use genomic screening on the winged guests of the bee hotel to identify which species suffer low genetic variability.
This trait the researchers explained may indicate certain genetic issues that can lead to the decline
or even extinction of a species. John Wraith NHAES director and dean of the College of Life sciences and Agriculture expressed enthusiasm for the bee hotel project and its related studies noting the impact that pollinators
and hopes that continued research and education can help reverse the trend in declining bee populations in New england and other regions.
and policymakers about native bees and habitat preferences we can encourage the regional and national authorities to create
and maintain native bee habitats Rehan said. Bee boxes wildflowers and unmowed pastures are but a few ways to improve healthy pollinator communities.
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but also don't consume anything derived from animals including eggs dairy honey and marshmallows which contain gelatin a protein obtained from animal byproducts.
#Farmers Get $3 Million in Bee Lunch Money There's no such thing as a free lunch
unless you're a bee. A new Department of agriculture initiative offers up to $3 million to improve the food supply for honeybees.
Of course the bees really do earn their keep. Commercial honeybees alone pollinate some $15 billion of produce each year according to the Associated press a number that doesn't include the economic impact of native bees that also pollinate crops.
But both native bees and imported honeybees are struggling in the face of colony collapse disorder a mysterious ailment that kills off whole hives.
Colony collapse may result in part from a plant virus that has started infecting bees scientists believe.
Other deadly viruses and possibly chemical contaminates play a roll as well. To stave the losses the USDA program will pay farmers
and other plants that bees love the AP reports. Livestock can also use these pastures to graze.
Feeding bees may help them stave off illness the agency hopes particularly in an agricultural landscape dominated by corn soybean and cotton not the insects'preferred plants.
Koh and colleagues believe the wine would have been brought from the countryside into the cellar where a wine master would have mixed in honey and herbs like juniper and mint before a meal.
000 Killer bees A municipal worker who got stung by an estimated 1000 bees while mowing a park lawn on Thursday (July 24) was in stable condition.
To be lethal the bees would likely have had to sting the man several hundred more times experts say.
In addition the victim seems not to have been allergic to the bees. The bees also stung two other workers who tried to help the man according to Wichita Falls'News Channel 6.)Not-so-killer bees Africanized honeybees
or killer bees have been in the United states since about 1990 according to May Berenbaum head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois. But despite their dramatic nickname these insects aren't that deadly.
Nature's 10 Biggest Pests An estimated 40 people in the United states die every year from stings by hymenoptera species. That group of insects includes some 150000 species of bees
Furthermore it's difficult to pin the blame on a particular species of bee in instances of injuries
These include the general health of the victims and their weight and sensitivity to bee venom.
Furthermore people who are allergic to bee stings can experience a severe physiological reaction after just one sting Berenbaum said. 8 Strange Signs You're Having an Allergic reaction Called anaphylactic shock this severe allergic reaction can prove lethal for some people attacked by bees.
and while she said that everyone is likely to experience some kind of allergic reaction to bee venom only some individuals experience anaphylactic shock.
Allergic to bees or not anyone who encounters a swarm of these defensive insects should run away she said.
As she explained the bees will just be waiting for you when you come up for a breath of air.
#As Plant virus Jumps to Bees, Does it Cause Colony Collapse? Jeff Nesbit was the director of public affairs for two prominent federal science agencies.
Researchers have studied bee colonies for years in an effort to discover the root causes for the collapse of millions of bee colonies an ongoing problem with significant downstream ripple effects for large-scale agriculture and food production efforts.
It is now common and routine for researchers to screen bees in colonies for rare viruses.
the scientists found a viral pathogen that typically infects plants spreading inside the bees. The detection of this virus (the Tobacco Ringspot Virus or TRSV) could help explain the decline of honeybees
whether this plant-infecting virus could also cause systemic infection in the bees said Yan Ping Chen a study author who works at ARS.
Besides TRSV researchers have linked Israel Acute Paralysis Virus Acute Bee Paralysis Virus Chronic Paralysis Virus Kashmir Bee Virus Deformed Wing Bee Virus
Last summer for instance researchers from the University of Maryland and the USDA collected 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
them to healthy bees. The pollen fed to the healthy bees contained an average of nine different types of pesticides and fungicides.
The researchers discovered that the 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.
What the study indicated is that there may not be a single cause of CCD it could be a complex web of many chemicals that involves different types and classes of pesticides and fungicides.
In the new mbio study researchers explained that about 5 percent of known plant viruses like TRSV are transmitted by pollen
More insidiously as far as bees are concerned is the way in which these error-filled virus copies become a sort of cloud of genetically-related variants that seemingly work in concert to determine the pathology of their hosts.
when it jumps from plants to bees. Viruses such as TRSV once they jump species are a likely source of emerging
The increasing prevalence of TRSV in conjunction with other bee viruses is associated with a gradual decline of host populations
This Op-Ed was adapted from Another Answer to Why the Bees Are Dying which first appeared in Nesbit's column At the Edge in U s. News & World Report.
Nature Newsbaiting mosquito traps with cards soaked in honey, and then analysing VIRAL RNA in saliva left by mosquitoes that feed on them,
and allowed them to feed on the honey-soaked cards for 2 days. The honey contained blue dye,
so that the tint in their gut would later indicate whether the insects had ingested it. The team then used a genetic test to analyse VIRAL RNA on the cards.
They found that many mosquitoes had consumed the honey, and that more than 70%of cards tested positive for the three viruses.
says James Strange, an entomologist at the USDA-ARS Bee Biology and Systematics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, a conference organizer.
and nurseries to monitor these islands of bee biodiversity, she adds. Scientists at the conference also identified a need for basic research into bumblebee genetic diversity.
Tired bees make poor dancers: Nature Newswe all struggle to communicate after a sleepless night,
Sleep-deprived bees are less proficient than their well-rested hive mates at indicating the location of a food source to other members of the colony by waggle dancing the figure-of-eight dance used to communicate the quality
Like all animals, European honeybees (Apis mellifera) rely on a sleep-like state of inactivity to survive
says that sleep deprivation could conceivably affect bees when hives are invaded by predators or parasites,
when apiculturists transport colonies over long distances, or as an everyday consequence of the busy nature of hives.
Bees bustle around, frequently bumping into each other, he says. It's also possible that sleep deprivation could exacerbate colony collapse disorder,
referring to recent alarming declines in bee populations worldwide, although this hasn't been tested. Klein and his colleagues devised a method to keep some bees within a colony awake without disturbing the rest of the hive.
They attached magnetic steel discs to 25 bees that had been trained to visit a feeder of sucrose solution located 1 kilometre away from the hive.
Another 25 trained bees were tagged with nonmagnetic copper discs. During the night, while the bees were asleep,
a bank of magnets mounted on a rail, called the'insominator'by the researchers, was passed back and forth along one wall of the hive for 12 hours,
jostling the steel-tagged bees and preventing them from dropping off. The researchers then observed the behaviour of the sleep-deprived bees
and their well-rested copper-tagged hive mates for 48 hours, watching a total of 545 waggle dances.
The team found that steel-tagged bees were less able than those with copper tags to indicate the direction from the hive to the feeder (see videos of waggle dances performed by non-sleep deprived
and sleep-deprived bees. The correct dance angle is superimposed over the dancer in each case.
However, their ability to communicate the distance to the feeder was affected not significantly. Signalling the direction information may be cognitively
However, Randolf Menzel, a neurobiologist at the Free University of Berlin who also studies bees,
says that the directional sense of bees is known to be partly magnetic. Changing the magnetic field may disturb their magnetic orientation,
We tested for that by comparing the dances between the magnetic steel-tagged bees and the copper-tagged bees on days when the bees had not been sleep-deprived,
he says. Currently a member of the BEEGROUP at the University of W Â rzburg in Germany, Klein says that he would like to investigate
whether the bees following the compromised waggle dances can find their way to the feeder.
Geneticists bid to build a better bee: Nature Newsfor Scott Cornman, the honeybee genome is prized a resource,
Cornman, a geneticist for the Bee Research Laboratory of the US Department of agriculture (USDA) in Beltsville, Maryland, is trying to characterize the various pathogens that plague the honeybee (Apis mellifera), arguably the world's most important insect.
His strategy is to subtract the honeybee genome from every other stray bit of genetic residue he can find in bee colonies, healthy and diseased.
The remaining genetic material gives a complex metagenomic portrait of other organisms that inhabit the bee's world
alone or in combination, might push a bee colony into precipitous decline. Right now we're in the discovery phase,
or so researchers in attendance last week at the Honey Bee Genomics & Biology meeting, held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New york. It was dedicated the first conference on the topic
honey  bee colonies across much of the Northern hemisphere began to show alarming declines. A syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) has been causing the insects to die off in large numbers,
and a greater prevalence of several viruses, two of which had not been detected in bees before. Yet despite having a multitude of enemies
many bees are holding their own, says research entomologist Jay Evans of the USDA's bee laboratory.
The question is not why are bees getting sick, but how are they surviving against this onslaught of parasites,
he says. The genome offers a window into the bees'immune pathways, Evans adds. The goal is to identify the genes that are crucial in helping bees thwart attack,
and, ultimately, to strengthen these defences. You can breed for these traits, but with genetic markers you could do it faster,
he says. In cases in which nature cannot do the job some researchers are now exploring more direct ways of boosting bees'resilience.
In some insects, double stranded-rna RNA, a hallmark of viral infection, can provoke a specific antiviral immune response.
Flenniken adds that knowing more about the bee's immune responses might help researchers to find ways of priming the system
and help bees to cope with their foes at the genomic level. Such a prospect may be a long way off,
oil and honey were traded, as well as fruit, fish, meat and resin. He says the DNA approach offers great promise for advances in terms of analysing amphora contents from archaeologically documented wrecks,
Job swapping makes its mark on honeybee DNASUBTLE differences in the DNA of honeybees are reflected in the bees'roles within the hive.
All honeybees (Apis mellifera) are born equal, but this situation doesn t last long. Although genetically identical, the bees soon take on the specific roles of queen or worker.
These roles are defined not just by behavioural differences, but by physical ones. Underlying them are minor modifications to their DNA:
Once a bee is a queen or worker, they fulfil that role for life the change is irreversible.
and Gro Amdam of Arizona State university in Tempe, the researchers coaxed forager bees back into nursing roles by removing all the nurses from the hive
Gene Robinson, a bee researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was involved not in the research,
If the link between behaviour and methylation patterns"is true in a bee, it is likely to also be true in us,
Perhaps bees can be used to figure out how it could be done
Cell structure gives African fruit its iridescent huethe hue is caused not by pigment, but by light reflecting off tightly coiled cellulose in the fruit's cell walls.
low doses of pesticides have subtle effects on individual bees and can seriously harm colonies.
Reports spark row over bee-bothering insecticidesthree reports by Europe s food safety body have stoked controversy over the possible links between the use of neonicotinoid insecticides and declining bee populations.
A number of scientific studies have linked neonicotinoids to adverse effects on bee colonies (see Nature video)
but some researchers believe that the drop in bee numbers seen in the United states, Europe and elsewhere is attributable to a combination of factors.
The reports conclude that these chemicals should be used only on crops that are not attractive to honey bees,
Dust and plant sap contaminated with the chemicals may also pose a risk to bees,
In the United kingdom, for example, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (Defra) has commissioned field studies on the impact of the insecticides on bees.
The chemical company pins most of the blame for bee declines on parasitic Varroa mites
Sure enough, when the bees landed, the flowers became a little more positively charged. Finally, the team released bumblebees into an arena with artificial flowers, half of which were carried positively charged
Over time, the bees increasingly visited the rewarding charged flowers. But when the researchers turned off the electrical charge on the flowers
and re-released the trained bees, the insects visited rewarding flowers only about half of the time,
That suggested that the bees were detecting the electric fields and using them to guide their activities,
Some experts suggest that the study has implications for insects other than bees.""If you think about it,
accurately reflect what is happening to bees in the field. Neonicotinoids, which poison insects by binding to receptors in their nervous systems
and pollen may be harming bees too by disrupting their ability to gather pollen, return to their hives
and reproduce1-6 (see The buzz over bee health). The past year has seen a raft of papers about the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on bees.
Scientists are debating their real-world significance. 20 april 2012: Honeybees in French fields exposed to thiamethoxam show impaired homing back to hives1.
imidacloprid and thiamethoxam should not be used where they might end up in crops that attract bees, such as oilseed rape and maize.
because many of the lab studies that have shown harm may have fed bees unrealistically high doses of neonicotinoids.
what doses bees actually encounter in the field.""Everyone is focused on hazard, he says.""We know there is hazard there.
However, David Goulson, a bee researcher at the University of Sussex, UK, thinks that most of the major studies have used realistic doses
they could play a part by making bees more susceptible to the parasitic mite Varroa destructor and the parasitic fungus Nosema apis,
although there might be"rare effects of neonicotinoids on bees in the field, these do not occur under normal circumstances.
Neuroscientist Christopher Connolly of the University of Dundee, UK, who has studied the effect of neonicotinoids in bee brains,
and that thiamethoxam was detected in two of the three bee groups tested, even though it was used not in the experiment.
"This debate has focused very heavily on bees. Perhaps we re missing a slightly bigger picture,
the mosquitoes struggled to distinguish the smell of honey from that of glycerol (an odourless liquid of similar consistency),
Pesticide ban In an effort to protect bees, the European commission has announced that a two-year ban on the use of three common pesticides on crops will begin on 1 december.
Scientists argue over whether neonicotinoids damage bee populations. See Nature 496 408 (2013) and go. nature. com/apvdlf for more.
Its publication on 14 june in The Journal of Applied Ecology comes soon after the European commission's April announcement of a two-year ban on three commonly used neonicotinoids over concerns that they are killing bees.
The very strong focus on bees has blinded perhaps people to the broader implications, Goulson says. Both papers demonstrate the importance of conducting ecosystem assessments after pesticide use,
owing to concerns that the chemical is contributing to the drastic decline in Europe s bee population.
Losing a single pollinator species harms plantsremoving even a single bee species from an ecosystem has serious effects on plant reproduction,
 Wild bee populations are declining severely in the United kingdom and the United States2, possibly because of pesticide use,
With help from volunteers, they then painstakingly caught the bees belonging to this group with nets
They also carefully caught bees as they were pollinating the flowering plant Delphinium barbeyi (a type of larkspur) and anaesthetised them
the other bee species were less fussy as shown by the broader variety of pollen they were carrying.
The number of bees carrying at least two types of pollen increased by 17.5%.%The fact that bees became less picky could be of concern,
because plants can only be fertilized by pollen from their own species. Indeed, the researchers found that after their bee-removal operation,
fewer flowers received their own type of pollen. As a result, each flower produced one-third fewer seeds on average."
Memmott says that it would also be interesting to see what removing bees does to other plants,
as well as to pollinators other than bees. Brosi says that his work adds weight to the argument that society should be more active in protecting pollinators.
How honeycombs can build themselvesthe perfect hexagonal array of bees honeycombs, admired for millennia as an example of natural pattern formation,
owes more to simple physical forces than to the skill of bees, according to a new study.
and his co-workers say that bees simply make cells that are circular in cross section and are packed together like a layer of bubbles.
which appears in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface1, the wax, softened by the heat of the bees bodies,
who contended that the bees had"a certain geometrical forethought. But in the seventeenth century, the Danish mathematician Erasmus Bartholin suggested that the insects need no such forethought.
He said that hexagons would result automatically from the pressure of each bee trying to make its cell as large as possible,
the comb cells of the Italian honeybee (Apis mellifera Ligustica) are circular (top), but after two days they already look more hexagonal (bottom).
The idea that the bees might first make circular cells, which become hexagonal subsequently, was proposed by Charles darwin.
It might seem like there is not much left for the bees to do once they ve made the circular cells.
tilt the axis of the cells very slightly up from the horizontal to prevent the honey from flowing out,
"if the bee s internal temperature is enough to melt wax, the temperature of the hive will always be close to the melting point,
But Karihaloo explains that not all the bees act as'heaters'.'The ambient temperature inside the comb is just 25o C,
and potentially harmful effects on pollinating insects such as bees. A study in New zealand now shows that the chemical can also change how native and invasive ants interact.
For example, honeybees (Apis mellifera) and gray jays (Perisoreus canadensis) 2 have been seen to violate IIA, and so have hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus) 3."On witnessing such behaviour in the past,
000 in grants for research to reduce the risks of pesticides, especially to bees. Scientists at Pennsylvania State university in University Park received funding to study alternatives to treating seeds with neonicotinoids,
a class of pesticide linked to declines in bee populations (see Nature 496,408; 2013). ) At Louisiana State university in Baton rouge, researchers will assess the long-term risks to bees from chemicals used in large-scale mosquito-abatement programmes.
Novartis woes The Japanese health ministry filed a criminal complaint on 9 Â January against Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis,
the bees'adaptable flight might help them to escape predators elsewhere, the authors suggest.""My first reaction was Wow,
The bees flew at simulated altitudes"much higher than I would have expected, he says. But it s a very convincing piece of work.
and a fall in oxygen levels would push the limits of the bees'metabolic systems. But the physiological factors that might stop the insects reaching high altitudes are understood not well.
Once the bees began to fly upwards, the pressure inside the chamber was reduced using a hand pump to simulate altitude increases in 500-metre intervals.
All five bees could hover at air pressures equivalent to elevations of 7 400 metres; three could fly above 8, 000 metres;
To work out how the bees did it, Dillon and Dudley analysed video footage taken from directly above the flight chamber.
They observed that the bees did not alter the frequency of their wing beats. Instead, the insects increased the angle through
However, that does not mean that bees could actually fly up Everest. Temperatures fall as altitude increases and the chill above 5,
"Unless there is some unknown reason why bees want to be at 8, 000 metres, then this extra capacity has to be for something else,
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