Home/Posts Tagged ‘honeybees’
Posts Tagged ‘honeybees’
Pollution, Wildlife & Flora, Mar 29th, 2012,
The jury is in: common agricultural pesticides disrupt the navigation systems of honeybees and reduce the weight and number of queens in bumblebee hives. Two separate studies showed strong links between pesticides and the epidemic disappearance of honeybees in the US and UK, known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Experiments showed that honeybees died or failed to return to their hives in much greater numbers than expected. Bumblebees exposed to typical levels of pesticides saw their hives populations shrink by 10% versus hives not exposed. What’s worse is they almost lost their ability to produce new queens. Only queens live…
Tags: bumblebees, CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder, honeybees, pesticides, UK, US
Conservation, Wildlife & Flora, Aug 30th, 2011,
Bees, and a handful of other flying insects, are responsible for pollinating about one in every three mouthfuls we eat. Without bees, the only way to produce apples, nuts, alfalfa, carrots, onions and many other crops would be by hand – using a brush to lift the pollen and apply it to the stigma of the female flowers. If insect pollination had to be replaced by hand pollination, it is estimated that it would cost the US alone $90m. –Guardian Last Wednesday honeybees stung a 95-year old man in Redondo Beach, California 400 times. Honeybees also recently stung 38 children…
Tags: Africanized, honeybees, killer bees, pollination
Pollution, Videos & Documentaries, Wildlife & Flora, Aug 8th, 2010,
Poor bees. We steal their honey, enslave them in order to pollinate apple orchards and then have the audacity to go berserk if one of them lands in our Frappuccino. Oh yeah, it also turns out we’re probably poisoning them with pesticides, causing their numbers to drop dramatically. The decline of the European honeybee – known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD – could in turn spell disaster for the future of monoculture crops, such as fruits, nuts, vegetables, flowers, seeds, beans and spices. A new study has linked common pesticides with CCD, spurring environmental groups into a new effort…
Tags: air, bees, CCD, control, European, Germany, honey, honeybees, monoculture, neonicotinoids, pesticides, quality, study
Science & Technology, Wildlife & Flora, Jun 24th, 2010,
Due to concerns over the rapid decline in the population of Britain’s insect pollinators in recent years, a research program was launched on Tuesday, allotting £10m (€12m) to the discovery of why bees and other insects are dying off. If all insect pollinators in the UK became extinct, it would cost the national economy £440m (€534m) per year. And although honeybees get most of the attention, they are just one of Britain’s many crucial pollinator insect species. From an article in the Guardian: According to the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, three of the 25 British species of bumblebees are…
Tags: bees, Britain, bumblebees, decline, economy, honeybees, insect, insects, pollinators, program, research, UK
Wildlife & Flora, Dec 10th, 2009,
Sibling rivalry can be a real pain to deal with, especially if you’re the parent. Be glad that your kids aren’t honeybees, though—a recent study, published in The Journal of Experimental Biology, shows that they can release a pheromone specifically for killing older sisters. The pheromone in question causes vital stores of the protein vitellogenin to move from fat tissue to the blood. The blood then moves the vitellogenin to head glands and there it’s converted into a jelly. Older sisters feed this jelly to the honeybee larvae, thus sacrificing their own energy stores to feed the next generation. Biologist…
Tags: brood pheromones, colony collapse, honeybees, sibling rivalry
Wildlife & Flora, Nov 23rd, 2009,
About a third of our diet depends on the pollination of crops by honeybees, including many fruits, vegetables, seeds, beans and spices. Over the past 30 odd years, the honeybee population has been declining. So far, food production has not been gravely affected, but scientists, farmers and beekeepers have cause to be worried. The disappearance of honeybees, termed Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, is an acute agricultural threat in North America and Western Europe. The latest mass die off of honeybees in the United States was unusual in that it was more rapid and more mysterious: bees disappeared suddenly and…
Tags: bees, CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder, honeybees, scientists, Varroa
