Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Honey bee”
Listen to Sainath Suryanarayanan, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin and co-author with Daniel Kleinman of Vanishing Bees: Science, Politics and Honeybee Health talking about the multifactoral causes of colony collapse disorder and the need for biological, sociological and ecological diversity.
As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more …
The following is an excerpt from the new bookMason Bee Revolution: How the Hardest Working Bee Can Save the World One Backyard at a Time [4] by Dave Hunter and Jill Lightner (Mountaineers Books, 2016): Why Keep Gentle Bees? When people hear “beekeeping,” the image they picture is almost always of honey bee keepers in white, helmeted spacesuits fretting over their hives …
A national study suggests that intensive farming is perhaps the greatest danger to wild bee survival. Led by University of Vermont scientist Dr. Insu Koh, the research team is the first to compare the species’ population over time with the location of pollinator-dependent crops. The researchers found that between 2008 and 2013, the abundance of wild bees dropped in almost …
The first Britain-wide assessment of the value of wild flowers as food for pollinators shows that decreasing resources mirror the decline of pollinating insects. The study, by researchers at the University of Leeds and University of Bristol supported by theCentre for Ecology and Hydrology and Fera Science Ltd, combines vegetation surveys taken over the last 80 years with modern-day measurements of nectar to provide …
A federal appeals court on Thursday overturned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) approval of a controversial pesticide, saying the agency violated federal law by giving a green light without obtaining or reviewing reliable studies on the neonicotinoid’s impact on honeybees. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal’s ruling (pdf) in the case, which was brought by environmental law firm Earthjustice, …
The world has been abuzz with the dramatic losses of cultivated honey bees due to colony collapse disorder1 as well as declines of native pollinator species across the globe.2,3,4 Scientists have recently begun calculating the extent to which food crops depend on animal pollinators including bees, butterflies, and bats,5 with one study assigning an economic value to the “ecosystem service” …
Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered that a tiny single-celled parasite may have a greater-than expected impact on honey bee colonies, which have been undergoing mysterious declines worldwide for the past decade. In this week’s issue of the journal PLOS ONE, the scientists report that a microsporidian calledNosema ceranae, which has been known to infect adult Asiatic and European honey bees, …
Yesterday, the Obama administration released its long awaited National Pollinator Health Strategy, a requirement of a presidential memorandum released last June, which directed federal agencies to establish a Pollinator Health Task Force, develop a strategy to protect pollinators and charged the EPA with assessing the effects of pesticides, including neonicotinoids, on bees and other pollinators within 180 days. While it’s promising that the …
Want proof that our representatives are likely taking handouts from Syngenta, Bayer, and other Big Ag makers of bee and butterfly killing neonicotinoids? Elected representative Rodney Davis of Illinois, who also happens to be the bee health committee chairman appointed to study pesticide and herbicide connections to colony collapse disorder, is singing the praises of neonicotinoids (neonics). Davis claims that the bee-killing …
