In 2005, beekeepers in the United States began observing a mysterious and disturbing phenomenon: once-healthy colonies of bees were suddenly collapsing, leaving behind empty hives full of honey and ...pollen. Over the following decade, widespread honeybee deaths-some of which have come to be called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)-have continued to bedevil beekeepers and threaten the agricultural industries that rely on bees for pollination. Scientists continue to debate the causes of CCD, yet there is no clear consensus on how to best solve the problem.
Vanishing Beestakes us inside the debates over widespread honeybee deaths, introducing the various groups with a stake in solving the mystery of CCD, including beekeepers, entomologists, growers, agrichemical companies, and government regulators. Drawing from extensive interviews and first-hand observations, Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman examine how members of each group have acquired, disseminated, and evaluated knowledge about CCD. In addition, they explore the often-contentious interactions among different groups, detailing how they assert authority, gain trust, and build alliances.
As it explores the contours of the CCD crisis,Vanishing Beesconsiders an equally urgent question: what happens when farmers, scientists, beekeepers, corporations, and federal agencies approach the problem from different vantage points and cannot see eye-to-eye? The answer may have profound consequences for every person who wants to keep fresh food on the table.
The purpose of this publication is to provide a 4-H project book that discusses honey bees and their importance to our nation’s agriculture. The intent is to introduce the world of honey bees to ...youth ages 8 to 12, with or without any previous beekeeping background or knowledge. This book consists of six sections that familiarize youth with the honey bee’s basic anatomy and life cycle, the three members of the honey bee colony, their roles and responsibilities, and colony communication. Each section has been designed to give youth a brief introduction to a topic and offers activities building on that topic. Written by Megan Hammond, Amy T. Vu, Mary Bammer, Emily Helton, Karen Henry, Jessica Sullivan, and James D. Ellis; 56 pp. https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/4h419
Honeybees interact strongly with vegetables, air, soil, and water in the vicinity of the hive and, as a consequence, pollutants from these sources are translated to the honeybees and to the hive ...products. Therefore, over the last decades of the past century, honeybees and honey have been proposed as possible bioindicators for the study of the environmental status of the area surrounding the hive. This work is a critical review on the use of the hive as a passive sampling device and on the use of honeybees and honey as environmental bioindicator substrates for metals and radionuclides. The design of sampling networks, sampling procedures, sample pretreatments, analytical techniques, data analysis, and other influencing factors in this area are also reviewed.
The similarity of sensitivity of adult Africanised and European honeybees following acute oral exposure to thiamethoxam has been questioned. Data collated from adult acute contact and oral toxicity ...testing of a range of thiamethoxam containing products (solo and mixtures) shows that the toxicity of these products to Africanised honeybees can be directly predicted from the toxicity of the active substances to European honeybees. Similarly, the acute contact and oral toxicity of dimethoate to Africanised bees lies within the same range as European honeybees. There are no major differences in the sensitivity of Africanised and European honeybee individuals to thiamethoxam and dimethoate.
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•Acute toxicity in Africanised bees can be predicted based on European honeybee data.•Toxicity of thiamethoxam products to Africanised bees could be reliably predicted.•Dimethoate toxicity data generated over a decade also showed similar sensitivity.•There is no difference in sensitivity (ng/bee) to these insecticides.
Microplastics are ubiquitous and their sampling is a difficult task. Honeybees interact with the environment inside their foraging range and take pollutants with them. In this work, we demonstrated ...for the first time that worker bees can act as active samplers of microplastics. We collected honeybees from apiaries located in the centre of Copenhagen and from nearby semiurban and rural areas. We showed the presence of microplastics in all sampled locations mostly in the form of fragments (52%) and fibres (38%) with average equivalent diameter of 64 ± 39 μm for fibres and 234 ± 156 μm for fragments. The highest load corresponded to urban apiaries, but comparable number of microplastics was found in hives from suburban and rural areas, which can be explained by the presence of urban settlements inside the foraging range of worker bees and to the easy dispersion of small microplastics by wind. Micro-FTIR analysis confirmed the presence of thirteen synthetic polymers, the most frequently of which was polyester followed by polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride. Our results demonstrated the presence of microplastics attached to the body of the honeybees and opens a new research pathway to their use as active biosamplers for anthropogenic pollution.
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•First detection of microplastics in honeybees•Worker bees can act as active samplers of microplastics.•Thirteen types of synthetic polymers the most abundant of which was polyester•Non-significant differences found between rural and urban hives
Beeswax is the substance that forms the structure of a honeycomb; the bees secrete wax to build the honeycombs where to store honey.Thanks to its rich hydrophobic protective properties,the beeswax is ...in fact present within cosmetics and body products.Also,beeswax is used in the food industry:as a film to wrap cheese for maturing or as a food additive(E901) to give shine to the products.Exactly as the honey which it contains,beeswax is also characterized by several therapeutic properties of great interest to us; it is thought to be particularly effective in healing bruises,inflammation and burns.Recently,the interest of researchers has moved even on antimicrobial properties of beeswax although there are still few studies in the literature focused only on the action of beeswax.The few studies showed an anitimicrobic effectiveness of beeswax against overall Staphylococcus aureus,Salmonella enterica,Candida albicans and Aspergillus niger; these inhibitory effects are enhanced synergistically with other natural products such as honey or olive oil.This minireview aims to be a collection of major scientific works that have considered the antimicrobial activity of beeswax alone or in combination with other natural products in recent years.
THE MOST COMMON CAUSES OF HONEYBEE POISONING Ratajac, Radomir; Petrović, Jelena; Kartalović, Brankica ...
Archives of Veterinary Medicine,
12/2021, Letnik:
14, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper will discuss the most common causes of poisoning of honey bees and other pollinating insects that occur in the Republic of Serbia and the world as well. Some potential ways of pollinator ...exposure to different poisons and their intake will be described. The paper will also deal with the methods of testing and assessing toxicity of newly synthesized chemical substances and new formulations, classification of potential toxic substances according to their chemical characteristics and mechanism of action on the insects, symptoms of honeybee poisoning and risk assessment for the uses of pesticides. In the end, the paper will look into the methods of responsible use of pesticides and their toxicity in order to avoid bee poisoning.
Finke, Scheiner, Giurfa, and Avarguès-Weber (2023) published correlational data on the performance of honeybees (Apis mellifera) in three learning tasks (associative, reversal, and negative ...patterning, capturing the domains of operant conditioning, executive-functioning-like ability, and inhibition plus configural processing, respectively) evaluated under both visual and olfactory stimulus conditions. They speculate that general cognitive ability (GCA) may be weakly causing all-positive correlations between performance in these different learning modalities, but do not formally test this possibility. A factor-analytic model applied to Finke et al. (2023) data revealed the presence of two perfectly congruent GCA factors (one for each stimulus condition). Both exhibited all-positive loadings, with the visual factor accounting for 46.8% of the performance variance and the olfactory factor accounting for 52.3%. Diagnostic statistics confirmed that in both stimulus conditions, the correlation matrices were adequate for factor analysis. These findings support extant hypotheses that GCA influences covariation between cognitive measures in honeybees, and constitute the first formal potential demonstration of GCA in an invertebrate. It is argued that GCA might be ubiquitous with respect to metazoans possessing organized nervous systems, perhaps because it convergently evolved multiple times in independent phylogenies, this being a key prediction of Christopher Chabris' Law of General Intelligence. Indeed, GCA has now been identified in insect, avian, mammal, and fish taxa. Some “primordial” aspects of GCA may even by basal to metazoans, and experiments employing Caenorhabditis elegans are suggested that could potentially shed light on such aspects. The findings are also strikingly inconsistent with evolutionary and comparative psychological theories positing a “modules first” understanding of cognitive evolution, such as one recent proposal that smaller brains cannot accommodate structures that give rise to GCA. Other theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
•The present study performed exploratory factor analyses on correlational matrices based on cognitive data on honey bees.•Horn's parallel models recommended the extraction of a general cognitive ability factor.•The measurement models accounted from 46.8% to 52.3% of the variance.•Principal Axis Factor analyses supported the presence of a general cognitive ability factor.•This factor loaded positively onto all cognitive indictors.
For beekeeping profitability even in droughty years, beekeepers replace natural bee food sources (pollen, nectar) with alternative food recipes based on energy syrups and protein flour, which ...determines certain consequences on the overall status of bee colonies and implicitly on their productions. The aim of this study was to analyze the impact of feeding with energy and energy-protein sources on food consumption and body weight of caged honeybees, during a 30 days period. Food consumption recorded the highest values for bees that received only energy feed, and the lowest values for those with energy-protein feed. Regarding to energy food, honey consumption recorded higher values than those of energy syrup consumption. The introducing of protein substances into food recipes (especially pollen substitutes) has led to an increase in the bee's body weight first, while in the last period this suddenly recorded lower values than those of bees fed only with energy food recipes; this could be due to the elimination of intestinal content.
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