Apiculture

Apiary (9)
Apiculture (4)
Bee (2340)
Beekeeping (170)
Honey (274)

Synopsis: 2.0.. agro: Apiculture:

while the Romans used a mixture of honey and bran followed by cork and ashes.

beekeepers and specialist growers take advantage of cleaner air, water and soils of Anthropocene cities, and vacant sites are used more effectively.

Specifically African bees are probably not the first, or even fifth idea, that comes to mind

For the past twelve years, Kenyan social business Honey Care Africa has developed its innovative Ëoebusiness in a Beehive'model that has allowed low-income farmers to easily earn more money by producing honey.

and oe most importantly of all-a contract for a guaranteed cash purchase of the resulting honey at fair market prices.

The honey, on the other hand, is a relatively stable and easy source of cash that farmers can depend on."

 says Madison Ayer, Honey Care Africa's CEO. The idea comes at a convenient time.

Global demand for honey constantly exceeds supply, and with bee colonies mysteriously disappearing in the US and Europe,

pure honey is becoming a valuable oe and expensive-commodity. The price of honey in the US is rising more than 6%annually,

and the market globally is expected to hit $12 billion by 2015. The reason is that"there's a certain magic to honey

 Ayers claims.""It's the only food that insects produce that humans eat regularly,

and for thousands of years honey has been used for its medicinal value. Â Â Â Â Aside from being a healthy and natural sweetener,

Yet the production of honey is a very slow, decentralized process. It's impossible to artificially produce

or mass manufacture pure honey. You need honeybees, space, wild flowers and ample time to for the bees to pollinate

and produce it. Sweet bonusin East Africa there are plenty of honeybees ready to meet the growing demand.

and recently completed an in depth study of Kenya's honey industry. While many rural farmers keep bees, the traditional method of collecting honey results in low quality honey and low harvesting yields."

"Smallholder farmers typically produce honey in traditional logs, and when harvest day comes they pack it in old fruit juice bottles,

and hawk it on the road sides  says Ogana. Honey Care tries to make this process more efficient and predictable.

The organization has even found a way to help those people who are afraid of bees

but like the idea of a sweet income, by hiring fulltime beekeepers within villages to manage individual farmers hives.

As an added bonus, pollination from the bees actually helps improve crop yields 15-30, %further adding to income.

which allows a fleet of beekeeping technicians who inspects hives across the country to enter troves of live data on farmers,

The app also allows global consumers to connect more with Kenyan beekeepers, says CEO Ayer.

For example, imagine picking up a jar of Honey Care Africa honey off the shelves of your local supermarket,

Â"We have our eyes on honey from the bees to the shelf. Â If you would like to comment on this story

Near the end of spring or the beginning of summer, honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies grow too large for their hives,

Thomas Seeley and Susannah Buhrman, who have studied decision making in swarms of honey bees write, we have seen that there is no omniscient supervisory bee that compiles all the evaluations

and selects the best site. Instead it is distributed the highly process of friendly competition among the scout bees that identifies the best site.

Hence the cognitive effort that each scout bee must make is evidently quite small relative to the information processing done by the entire swarm.

For honey bees, few individuals possess valuable information, which the rest of the group relies on.

However, social species throughout the animal kingdom often have to make decisions without the aid of expert knowledge.

A female honey bee becomes queen based on what she eats in the first days of her life

(though worker bees do seem to have some influence over who becomes queen, giving honey bees the most humanlike election process).

identify bird flu and figure out what plants the bees that made your honey were pollinating. Damon Little, a curator at the New york Botanical gardens has used it to see

I pass a street filled with cafes where groups of people sit outside engulfed in clouds of honey-scented smoke.

the beauty pro suggested adding half a teaspoon of honey and a quarter teaspoon of milk or soy milk to the batter. oeboth of those ingredients hydrate

The honey really binds the mask together too, she added. With so many beauty benefits, Cox considers pumpkin the oehero ingredient of Thanksgiving foods

#Bees Reveal Nature-Nurture Secrets oeits crazy how realistic they look when there under a microscope!

The nature-nurture debate is a oegiant step closer to being resolved after scientists studying bees documented how environmental inputs can modify our genetic hardware.

because the enzymes that mark DNA in the bee are also the enzymes that mark DNA in human brains,

said Professor Maleszka. oein the bees, more than 550 genes are marked differentially between the brain of the queen and the brain of the worker,

This study provides the first documentation of extensive molecular differences that may allow honey bees to generate different reproductive and behavioural outcomes as a result of differential feeding with royal jelly.

so the humble honey bees are the pioneers in this fascinating area. more via sciencedaily. com Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati e

Since 2006,20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United states alone have suffered oecolony collapse.

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have interacted apparently to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLOS One.

Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said a subject for the next round of research.

and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is compromised somehow.

And a group of scientists led by Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana in Missoula has researched bee-related applications for the military in the past developing, for example

Human nature and bee nature were interconnected in how the puzzle pieces came together. Two brothers helped foster communication across disciplines.

Even learning how to mash dead bees for analysis a skill not taught at West point became a factor.

One perverse twist of colony collapse that has compounded the difficulty of solving it is that the bees do not just die they fly off in every direction from the hive,

That makes large numbers of bee autopsies and yes, entomologists actually do those problematic. Dr. Bromenshenks team at the University of Montana and Montana State university in Bozeman, working with the Armys Edgewood Chemical Biological Center northeast of Baltimore, said in their jointly written paper that the virus-fungus

whether one malady weakens the bees enough to be finished off by the second, or whether they somehow compound the others destructive power. oetheyre co-factors,

Bees, Dr. Wick said, proved to be a perfect opportunity to see what the Armys analytic software tool could do brought. oewe it to bear on this bee question,

which is how we field-tested it, he said. The Army software system an advance itself in the growing field of protein research

The power of that idea in military or bee defense is immense, researchers say, in that it allows them to use

saw a television interview with Dr. Bromenshenk about bees. Mr. Wick knew of his brothers work in Maryland,

and the Bee Alert team buzzing around the same blossom. The first steps were awkward, partly because the Army lab was used not to testing bees,

or more specifically, to extracting bee proteins. oeim guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda,

we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk, Charles Wick said. oeit was complicated very.

The process eventually was refined. A mortar and pestle worked better than the desktop, and a coffee grinder worked best of all for making good bee paste.

Scientists in the project emphasize that their conclusions are not the final word. The pattern, they say,

like the virus and fungus involved in bee deaths, are quite common, and that one answer in protecting bee colonies might be to focus on the fungus controllable with antifungal agents especially

when the virus is detected. Still unsolved is what makes the bees fly off into the wild yonder at the point of death.

One theory, Dr. Bromenshenk said, is that the viral-fungal combination disrupts memory or navigating skills

and the bees simply get lost. Another possibility he said, is a kind of insect insanity.

In any event, the universitys bee operation itself proved vulnerable just last year, when nearly every bee disappeared over the course of the winter.

Via New york times Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati s

#What Whole Wheat Really Means Is your bread actually made with whole grains? Whole wheat, multigrain, 12-grain, oemade with whole grains here are many labels you can put on bread to make it sound healthy.

#New Bee Species Discovered in Canada Sweat bee Researchers Jason Gibbs who was working on a study of sweat bees discovered a new species while commuting from downtown Toronto to York University.

while examining 84 species of sweat bees in Canada so named because they are attracted to perspiration

His study goes a long way in cataloging a variety of bee that has proven a oenightmare to study.

sweat bees are tough to study because it is hard to pin a specimen to a certain species. oethey are a nightmare to identify to species

because their physical characteristics their morphologies are so similar among species. No one has been able to identify these bees until now

even though they make up so many of the bees we collect, says Gibbs. oeits important to identify these species,

because if we dont know what bees we have, we cant know what bees were losing.

Taking the challenge head on, Gibbs was able to identify 19 new species of sweat bee,

including a cuckoo bee, which will invade another sweat bees next and lay its eggs on the pollen

and nectar collected by the competitor. Via Treehugger Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati l

#Your Cremated Ashes Made Into Vinyl Records Music lovers can now be immortalised when they die by having their ashes baked into vinyl records to leave behind for loved ones.

A UK company called And Vinyly is offering people the chance to press their ashes in a vinyl recording of their own voice,

#City Bees Are Healthier and More Productive Than Their Country Cousins An urban beekeeper. While their country cousins populations collapse, bees in Paris are thriving as having a rooftop hive becomes de rigueur for hotels

and restaurants seeking an in-house source of homegrown artisanal honey. According to the BBC, the urban bees are healthier

and more productive than ones in rural France and they seem to like the City of light for the same reason many people do:

Parisian beekeeper Simonpierre Delorme told the BBC. oein the countryside, by contrast, these days there is often just one crop dominating an entire area.

there is no more nectar for the local bees. More Honey, Lower Death rates Thanks to the veritable buffet of eating options think of it as an apiarian raw bar or cheese platter as well as Paris 10 years as a pesticide-free zone

the bees in the citys 400 and counting hives produce an average of 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of honey each year,

and up to 80 kilograms if things go well. In the country, 30 kilograms is considered a good annual yield.

According to the National Union of French Beekeepers, they also have a death rate of just 3 to 5 percent,

one of the first buildings to reinstate the urban apiary tradition, some 15 years ago.

though, the success of bees in the city also serves to further highlight their struggles in the countryside,

where declining rural biodiversity has made it hard out there for a pollen eater. oewe did an analysis of the honey we made here in Paris

an artist and urban beekeeper who create bee-related art installations to raise awareness about the issue. oeit is an unwelcome paradox that city bees do better than country bees.

and this is what the bees are telling us. Via Treehugger Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati m

#Are Cell Phones to Blame for the Disappearance of Honey Bees? Researchers claim they have found the cause of the decline in bees which could be the first step in reversing the decline.

The growing use of mobile telephones is behind the disappearance of honey bees and the collapse of their hives,

scientists have claimed. Their disappearance has caused alarm throughout Europe and North america where campaigners have blamed agricultural pesticides,

Britain has seen a 15 per cent decline in its bee population in the last two years

and say that it probably interfering with the bees navigation senses. They set up a controlled experiment in Punjab earlier this year comparing the behaviour

and productivity of bees in two hives one fitted with two mobile telephones which were powered on for two fifteen minute sessions per day for three months.

The bees also stopped producing honey. The queen bee in the oemobile hive produced fewer than half of those created by her counterpart in the normal hive.

which helps them in navigation. oethere are reports of sudden disappearance of bee populations from honeybee colonies.

Tim Lovett, of The british Beekeepers Association, said that hives have been successful in London where there was high mobile phone use. oeprevious work in this area has indicated this mobile phone use is not a real factor,

The UK Government has set aside £10 million for research into the decline of pollinators like bees,

According to the University of Durham, Englands bees are vanishing faster than anywhere else in Europe,

The most recent statistics from last winter show that the decline in honey bees in Britain is slowing

and in Germany beekeepers have started fitting GPS tracking devices to their hives. Via Telegraph Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati m

#Bees Prefer Flowers with Caffeine Bees prefer certain kinds of nectar. Also nicotine! A study conducted at the University of Haifa revealed that bees prefer nectar containing those psychoactive substances.

Flower nectar is comprised primarily of sugars, which provide energy for the potential pollinators. But the floral nectar of some plant species also includes small quantities of substances known to be toxic,

reaching 94.2 milligrams per liter The results showed that bees clearly prefer nectar containing nicotine and caffeine over the oeclean nectar.

the bees preferred the latter. The presumption is that natural selection has favored those plants that satisfy the desires of their pollinators.

whether the bees are addicted to caffeine and nicotine. Link. Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati e

#Cow Manure from Dairy farms Could Help Power Internet Giants Cow manure from dairy farms could help power Google

#Bee Colonies Still Dying Out in Record Numbers To bee or not to be? You may know that

since about 2006 there has been a large and growing problem with the honey bees which play a large part in fertilizing our flowers and crops.

Many bees, and in fact whole colonies have been dying due to an unknown factor which had been named Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD.

according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US governments Agricultural research service (ARS.

which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy. Link via reddit Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati n

But she is now back on her feet after trying a treatment called Bee Venom Therapy (BVT.

The treatment involves holding a bee in a pair of tweezers and deliberately stinging an area of skin on the patients body.

Most people would be terrified by the prospect of being stung by a bee. But when you have a condition like MS,

and get hold of a single bee. Then you gradually desensitise your body to the sting by injecting it in and out of your skin a few times.

Bee Venom Therapy, or Apitherapy, uses the stings of live bees to relieve symptoms of MS such as pain, loss of coordination,

and muscle weakness. Researchers suggest that certain compounds in bee venom reduce inflammation and pain and a combination of all its ingredients helps the body to release natural healing compounds.

The alternative treatment remains unproven by evidence-based medicine but it has been used to treat other wasting diseases and arthritis. via Arbroath Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati o

Some honey makers dilute their honey with sugar beets or corn syrup, their competitors say, but still market it as 100 percent pure at a premium price.

Modern insects like bees and wasps rely on flowers for nectar and pollen. oethe fossil record suggests that a lot of these insect groups originated before angiosperms appeared,

This study shifts the oldest angiosperms back farther in time towards the origin of groups like bees and flies,

#Bees Can Remember What Human faces Look like If you ever get into a tense confrontation with a bee,

and then you have to back down for whatever reason, dont try to salvage it by saying oeremember the face.

Because it turns out bees can do that. Its long been known that bees are capable of recognizing

and retaining complex visual patterns. Thats one way theyre able to tell different kinds of flowers apart.

But a joint project between researchers at the Universit de Toulouse and Melbournes Monash University has found that bees can be trained to distinguish flowers from human faces

A group of bees were shown pictures of human faces and pictures of random geometric designs, and rewarded with sugar

After doing this for a while, the bees were shown a different set of images that resembled faces;

Whats happening here isnt exactly oelearning theres no reason to think that bees know any of the salient differences between people and flowers,

Insofar as a distinction exists in the bees mind, they probably think of human faces as very oddly-shaped flowers.

While theres no evidence that bees can recognize and revisit individual human faces, its probably too soon to say for sure;

bees have a way of surprising us. It was only a few months ago that researchers learned that bees have some kind of internal mechanism that allows them to keep track of energy expenditure,

even when flying through optical illusions created in a lab. How theyre able to do this, with brains smaller than a peppercorn,

Heres hoping the ongoing global bee die off comes to an end soon it seems were losing some of the smartest insects on the planet.

Bees recognize human faces using feature configuration Science Daily Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati n

#Biofortification Will Become a Trend in the future Evan Ryan travelled the world looking at trace element nutrition in broadacre cropping A Yarrawonga farmer believes oebiofortification of grain with trace elements will become a trend in the future.

#Bees Prefer Nectar with Caffeine and Nicotine Bees are attracted to nectar which are laced with caffeine

and nicotine Many people feel they need a cigarette and a cup of coffee to start the day

and now it turns out bees are no different. The honey-making insects prefer nectar with small amounts of nicotine and caffeine over plain nectar, researchers revealed.

whether the substances were intended to entice bees or whether they were byproducts with no particular role.

as in humans, to make the bee addicted, said lead researcher Professor Ido Izhaki. Nicotine is found naturally in floral nectar mostly in types of tobacco tree,

In order to examine whether bees prefer the nectar containing caffeine and nicotine, the researchers offered artificial nectar that comprised various natural sugar levels and various levels of caffeine and nicotine,

The results showed that bees preferred the nectar with the highest levels of nicotine and caffeine.

and not repel bees, thereby giving them a significant advantage over other plants. The researchers emphasized that this study has proved a preference, not addiction,

whether the bees do indeed become addicted to nicotine and caffeine. Via Daily mail Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati o

and mix the meat with honey and the juice of an amalaka (an Asian gooseberry-like fruit).

#Stingless Bees Mumify Attackers That Cant Be stung Stingless bee Scientists have discovered that bees use more than their stingers to defeat potential attackers.

New Scientist reports that researchers from The swiss Bee Research Centre in Bern have discovered a species of bee an Australian stingless bee called Trigona Carbonaria that has developed a previously unseen way to ward off attackers.

and are trying to find a way to train bees to help them diagnose TB

#When we tested them with the tuberculosis odours we found the bees can still smell it down to parts per billion,

Christchurch zoologists are training bees to associate the smell of the disease with a sweet treat

using bees instead could make a real difference. Bees help in the battle against tuberculosis (Image:

Honeybee on Snakeroot, a Creative Commons Attribution (2. 0) image from dendroica s photostream) Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati e

#11 new species of bees discovered Gotham bee, is one of 11 newly identified bee species. Eleven new species of sweat bees has been identified by one researcher,

these bees aren t new at all. They ve probably been right under our noses all this time.

The new identifications were made by Cornell entomologist Jason Gibbs by checking dead-bee collections and conducting DNA tests.

Species names and descriptions were published last month in the journal Zootaxa as part of a reshuffling of the family tree for 97 species of sweat bees.

Gibbs said there may be thousands of bee species yet to be identified. This highlights the need for additional studies of our major pollinators,

One bee may look like another, but there can be subtle morphological and genetic differences that set them apart.

If the bees are so dissimilar that they can t breed with each other, they re considered separate species. MITOCHONDRIAL DNA tests provide a reliable way to map out species relationships by revealing how long ago particular strains of creatures diverged.

These bees are morphologically and genetically distinct enough that you can say with confidence that they are their own species,

Sweat bees are named so because they get some of their sustenance from licking the sweat off our skin.

Four of the species that Gibbs identified are cuckoo bees, #which have lost the ability to build their own nests and collect pollen.

These species lay their eggs in the nests of other bees, which end up raising the invaders progeny.

Gibbs named one of the cuckoo-bee species Lasioglossum izawsum, which is awesome.)Four of the species were found in the New york city area,

which led The New york times to declare that the Big Apple has a bee to call its own.#

but if you want to think of L. gotham as the Batman bee#instead, no one s going to stop you.

Some of these labels echo the names of other bee researchers: Cornell s George Eickwort, for example,

The Times reported that L. katherineae was identified by analyzing a dead bee that had been sitting in a drawer at the museum since 1903.

The fact that the list of bee species is a little longer than it used to be doesn t mean that the widely publicized crisis besetting the bees is over.

This discovery doesn t counter the idea that bees are told declining, #Gibbs me. What it points out is that there are a lot of species we don t enough about to say whether they re at a stable level.#

#Identifying the wide variety of bee species just might be the first step toward identifying the factors that keep some populations healthy

Even though these bees were described only recently, we can go back to the collections by digitizing records,

How about a mixed locust salad with bee crã me brã lã e for dessert?

There are even claims that bees boost the libido. Insects emit less greenhouse gases than cattle

There is also the possibility of extracting honey from poplar tree flowers, which could be something for sale on site.

#Beekeeping thrives in U s. cities There are more than 1000,000 bees in a hive on top of City hall in Chicago.

In the garden stand two beehives where more than 100,000 bees come and go in patterns more graceful,

The bees are storing honey that will sustain them through the bitter winter and be sold in a gift shop just blocks away.

Already this season, one hive has produced 200 pounds of surplus honey which is really a huge amount of honey,

#said beekeeper Michael Thompson after checking the hives one July morning. The state average is 40 pounds of surplus honey per hive.#

#The Chicago bees success could be due to the citys abundant and mostly pesticide-free flowers.

Many bee experts believe city bees have a leg up on country bees these days because of a longer nectar flow, with people planting flowers that bloom from spring to fall,

and organic gardening practices. Not to mention the urban residents who are building hives at a brisk pace.

Beekeeping is thriving in cities across the nation, driven by young hobbyists and green entrepreneurs. Honey from city hives makes its way into swanky restaurant kitchens and behind the bar,

where its mixed into cocktails or stars as an ingredient in honey wine. Membership in beekeeping clubs is skewing younger and growing.

The White house garden has beehives. The city of Chicagos hives#nine in all, on rooftops and other government property#are just part of the boom.

Ive seen hives set up on balconies and in very, very small backyards,#said Russell Bates, a TV commercial director and cofounder of Backwards Beekeepers,

a 3-year-old group that draws up to 100 mostly newcomers to its monthly meetings in Los angeles. The group is backwards

#because its members rely on natural, non-chemical beekeeping practices. All their hives are populated by local bees theyve captured

#or rescued#as the groups members like to say#from places theyre not wanted. We dont use mail-order bees#

Bates said. Local bees have adapted to this environment. Theyre the survivors.##City governments, won over by beekeepers passion,

are easing restrictions. In recent years, New york, Denver, Milwaukee and Santa monica have made beekeeping legal. The Backwards Beekeepers group is working to legalize beekeeping in Los angeles. The mysterious disappearance of honeybees,

first reported in 2006 by commercial beekeeping operators who lost 30 to 90 percent of their hives,

led some state agriculture departments to encourage hobby beekeeping. The U s. Department of agriculture estimates about one-third of the nations diet directly or indirectly benefits from honeybee pollination.

Researchers have yet to determine a cause for colony collapse disorder##but they say likely culprits include pathogens, parasites, environmental strains and bee management practices that cause poor nutrition.

In Washington, a biology professor who is studying whether pollen richer in protein makes bees healthier plans to compare urban bees protein intake with that of bees in the country.

Pollen contains a lot of protein. The amount varies from plant species to plant species, #said Hartmut Doebel, George washington University researcher and beekeeper.

One idea is that bees that are healthy will fight off diseases better.##The university is partnering with the restaurant Founding Farmers a few blocks away.

The restaurant recently put six beehives on the roof of an academic building, and Doebel and his students will study the bees,

tracking their pollen sources and their health. The restaurant will use the surplus honey on its menu.

We dont expect honey this year, #said Valerie Zweig, Founding Farmers honey director. We hope for next summer.

One of our signature dishes is corn bread with honey butter. Well use it in that and maybe in marinades or maybe a cocktail.

We may showcase it on its own in a little honey pot with some iced tea.##Greg Fischer of Wild Blossom Meadery and Winery in Chicago has about 40 beehives in the city and another 60 in more rural areas.

His company turns the honey into mead, a fermented beverage that can be dry like Riesling or sweet like a dessert wine.

Fischer once worked with a company that trucked bees around the country to pollinate sunflowers in South dakota, almonds in California and other crops in other states.

He said city bees kept by hobbyists and smaller operators are healthier than bees used in commercial agriculture.

Youre putting them on a semi and throwing a net over them,##Fischer said. Youre on the road three or four days.

It kind of stresses them out.##For some city residents, beekeeping represents a return to the family farms of their childhoods.

Her bees live in three hives in a community garden in a once-vacant lot near a fire station and elevated train tracks.

#Urban beekeepers may be biased, but they contend their honey tastes better than country honey since it takes on essences from plants the bees visit.

Thompson stuck a toothpick into a small jar of Chicago City hall honey and tasted it.

He described it as complex with nectar from a variety of mints from Lurie Garden in Millennium Park and linden trees in Grant Park.

The honeys taste changed after Lurie Garden was installed in 2004, he said. I guess it tastes more complicated now,

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