For Our Beekeepers

nowhereman;923378 wrote:

Personally, I think it's a gimmick. If honey is thin enough to flow, the moisture content is probably too high, which would promote fermentation. Honey reads around 18% on a refractometer, down from the 80+% moisture of nectar.

Extraction is done by either cutting off the cappings and spinning the frames in an extractor or by "crush-and-strain", whereby the combs are cut from the frame and either hung to drain or crushed with something resembling a potato masher.

I also don't see what happens to the bees on the frames that are pierced - do they get pierced as well?

Interesting concept, but something for those with extra cash to play with. Rev. Langsroth (developer of the currently used 10 frame hives and discoverer of "bee space") had it right.

Gravdigr;923329 wrote:

...
The guys behind it have raised almost $5,000,000, twelve days into their Indiegogo campaign.
...

Griff;923464 wrote:

It was absolute genius in its time but we've come a long way in our knowledge of the honeybee, materials development, and design in the intervening 163 years. This is likely the opening salvo in a total remake.

nowhereman;923555 wrote:

Every time I work in the hives, I'm reminded that the bees know more about beekeeping than I do.

It’s a concept that’s both simple and terrifying. For years, scientists have known that honeybees are disappearing at an alarming rate. Fewer honeybees means less pollination, which could lead to a rapid drop in food supplies. If the bee die-off continues, the entire human race will be threatened. We need bees.

Fortunately, researchers at the University of Minnesota may have come up with an Internet of Things device that could help prevent the bee-pocalypse.

One theory behind the massive bee collapse involves the Varroa destructor mite, a tiny, vampirelike parasite that lives inside honeybee colonies and literally sucks the life out of them, infecting them with a virus that contributes to colony collapse disorder.

The Eltopia MiteNot can wipe out the mites using a circuit board camouflaged to blend in with a traditional honeycomb frame made from cornstarch wax and other renewable materials. Beekeepers install one MiteNot frame inside the hive; the board’s embedded sensors detect temperature fluctuations and other environmental data, then transmit it via a 3G cellular connection to Eltopia’s cloud-based BeeSafe application.

Based on sensor data, BeeSafe can detect the optimal moment when female mites have laid their eggs, but before the male mites have fertilized them. It then sends a command back to the MiteNot frame to heat up just enough to sterilize the male mites without harming the bees.

When covered in wax, the frame with MiteNot installed becomes indistinguishable from any other part of the hive and can be reused as needed. Its great advantage is that it can fight the mites without the use of pesticides, which could also harm the bees.

The Eltopia MiteNot is still being tested, but it may be available as early as fall 2015. Hopefully we’ll all still bee around by then.

The corridor is set to cover a pollen station every 250 meters.

“The idea is to create a route through the city with enough feeding stations for the bumblebees all the way. Enough food will also help the bumblebees withstand manmade environmental stress better,” Tonje Waaktaar Gamst of the Oslo Garden Society told Osloby newspaper, The Local reports.

When wasp is art The construction of structures in nature is very widespread and very few ones who stop to think about how to make an animal to build such structures. Just to quote Richard Dawkins: Just imagine the newspapers if a marine biologist discovered a species of dolphins weaving fishing nets large, complex securities with a diameter of twenty dolphins! And yet we take for granted the cobwebs, considering them as a nuisance in the house rather than as one of the wonders of the world. from The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins As the cobwebs even the wasp nests represent a nuisance that happens every year in spring. Before you drive them away, stop watching the perfect geometry of the nest. The building material varies greatly in different species, not just wasps but also in bees. The masons of wasps Sceliphron kind are actually bees (in fact belong to the superfamily Apoidea and not vespoidea) and build nests using mud, inside which the larvae grow by eating paralyzed spiders.

Let's focus on cellulose nests, built in Italy by various species of Vespids belonging to the genera Vespa, Vespula, Dolichovespula and Polistes.
The other genera distributed a little 'everywhere in the world leave no brake to the imagination, first of all Stenogastrinae, a subfamily of wasps of Southeast Asia that build nests rather bizarre.

Returning to native species, we come to the real purpose of this article: to show how, with a little 'color and imagination, these buildings can appear even the least artistic insect lovers.
Below you can see a small colony in the founding of Polistes dominula. The species has an interesting behavioral repertoire, very well designed, and is used as a model species for studies on dell'eusocialità.
This nest was found with two founding in mid-April, then unfortunately one of them died.

To individuals placed in captivity has been provided food and paper for nest building, at first only yellow, then colored.

A worker recently sfarfallata remains holed up in the cell.

In the lower left you see two wasps while doing trophallaxis.

Right some larvae are exposed on the outside of the cells.

Another case of mass poisoning took place in the first century BC. Knowing that rhododendron was poisonous and that when bees made honey from rhododendron nectar, the honey contained alkaloids that could severely sicken humans, the Heptakomotes (who lived in what is now Turkey) used it to defend themselves against the Roman legions led by Pompey the Great. They left batches of the toxic honey near the path of Pompey’s advancing troops, and the soldiers, who thought they’d found abandoned spoils of war, ate it all. The fierce Roman soldiers— now suffering from delirium, vomiting, and diarrhea— were easily defeated by the weaker Heptakometes.

LARAMIE, Wyo. (AP) — A semi carrying beehives crashed on a Wyoming highway, unleashing millions of bees that hovered in a giant swarm over the roadway.

The Laramie Boomerang reports beekeepers were called out to handle the buzzing mass, which Wyoming Highway Patrol Trooper Aren Peter said stretched a football field length in every direction.

Peter says the driver apparently fell asleep at the wheel and the truck veered off the roadway, landing on its side. Peter said the driver refused medical attention and was more worried about recovering the bees and getting back on the road.

Peter says he remained in his car while responding to the crash for fear he would get stung.

HAMPDEN - Massachusetts Environmental Police said they found "no violations" by a man who shot a black bear on his property over the weekend.
The unidentified man shot the bear on Monson Road on Saturday afternoon. Police described it as a 200-pound adult.
Investigators said the shooting was justified because the bear was "actively destroying the man's beehives," which is a legitimate reason to kill an animal under state law.

xoxoxoBruce;960411 wrote:

Here's a charm for beekeepers. Actually it's supposed to be a Hornet school mascot, but beekeepers are adaptable folk. :D

glatt;960447 wrote:

Last night I made a carpenter bee trap.

We'll see how it works. The little shits are eating my house.

Roger Burns, of Pembrokeshire Beekeepers, said: "It is possible the queen had been attracted to something in the car - perhaps a sweet or food in the car.

"The swarm of around 20,000 had followed her and were sat around on the boot of the car.

"I brought over a cardboard box and carefully brushed them into there as quickly as possible as I was aware it was a big swarm in the middle of the high street.

"I got about 15 or 20 stings for my trouble. I then left the cardboard box on the roof while we waited for the last few hundred bees to leave the boot but then a gust of wind blew it off and the queen may have fled back to the boot again."

Retired GP Roger, 65, said: "I then had to leave and another beekeeper took up the watch however eventually the car owner returned and drove off.

"I have been beekeeping for 30 years and I have never seen a swarm do that. It is natural for them to follow the queen but it is a strange thing to see and quite surprising to have a car followed for two days. It was quite amusing."

A bumblebee is now on the endangered species list for the first time in a "race against extinction," the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday. The agency placed the rusty patched bumblebee on the list because of a dramatic population decline over the past 20 years. Since the late 1990s, the population of the species has plummeted 87%. Named because of the rust-colored marks on its back, the bee was once common and abundant across 28 states from Connecticut to South Dakota. Today, the bee is only found in small, scattered populations in 13 states...

It's not just the rusty patched bumblebee that is struggling in the U.S. Other species have experienced dramatic declines in recent decades. The reduction is believed to be caused by a combination of habitat loss, disease, pesticide use, climate change and an extremely small population size...

This is the first bee of any type in the continental U.S. to be placed on the list. In September, the Obama administration designated seven species of bees in Hawaii as endangered.

You've probably heard the bad news by now that bees were recently added to the endangered species list for the first time. But if you're part of the 60 percent of people who share stories without actually reading them, you might have missed an important detail: namely, that the newly endangered bees are a handful of relatively obscure species who live only in Hawaii.
The bees you're more familiar with — the ones that buzz around your yard dipping into flowers, making honey, pollinating crops and generally keeping the world's food supply from collapsing? Those bees are doing just fine, according to data released by the USDA this year...

The number of commercial bee colonies is still significantly higher than it was in 2006, when colony collapse disorder — the mass die-offs that began afflicting U.S. honeybee colonies — was first documented...
“Honey bees are not about to go extinct,” Kim Kaplan, a researcher with the USDA, said in an email. “It is the beekeepers who are in danger, facing unsustainable economic losses."

It's like saying thousands of people are dying, but it's fine, in 9 months they can make more. Bees are indicators of a healthy environment and even if commercial bee keepers can quickly replace dead honey bees it still means something is terribly wrong.

It's like saying thousands of people are dying, but it's fine, in 9 months they can make more. Bees are indicators of a healthy environment and even if commercial bee keepers can quickly replace dead honey bees it still means something is terribly wrong.

Perry and his colleagues wrote Thursday in the journal Science that, despite bees' miniature brains, they can solve new problems quickly just by observing a demonstration. This suggests that bees, which are important crop pollinators, could in time adapt to new food sources if their environment changed.

As we have reported on The Salt before, bee populations around the world have declined in recent years. Scientists think a changing environment is at least partly responsible.

Perry and colleagues built a platform with a porous ball sitting at the center of it. If a bee went up to the ball, it would find that it could access a reward, sugar water.

One by one, bumblebees walked onto the platform, explored a bit, and then slurped up the sugar water in the middle.

"Essentially, the first experiment was: Can bees learn to roll a ball?" says Perry.

Then, the researchers moved the ball to the edge of the platform.

"The bees came out, looked at the center, didn't have reward. They went to the ball, didn't have reward. They had to figure out that they needed to move the ball from the edge to the center, and then they'd get reward," says Perry.

The ball was a token, like the dollar bill you'd put in a vending machine. The sugar water was like a can of soda that could only be unlocked using the token.

If a bee couldn't figure out how to get the reward, a researcher would demonstrate using a puppet — a plastic bee on the end of a stick — to scoot the ball from the edge of the platform to the center.

"Bees that saw this demonstration learned very quickly how to solve the task. They started rolling the ball into the center; they got better over time," says Perry.

The difficulty to simultaneously record neural activity and behavior presents a considerable limitation for studying mechanisms of insect learning and memory. The challenge is finding a model suitable for the use of behavioral paradigms under the restrained conditions necessary for neural recording. In honeybees, Pavlovian conditioning relying on the proboscis extension reflex (PER) has been used with great success to study different aspects of insect cognition. However, it is desirable to combine the advantages of the PER with a more robust model that allows simultaneous electrical or optical recording of neural activity. Here, we briefly discuss the potential use of bumblebees as models for the study of learning and memory under restrained conditions. We base our arguments on the well-known cognitive abilities of bumblebees, their social organization and phylogenetic proximity to honeybees, our recent success using Pavlovian conditioning to study learning in two bumblebee species, and on the recently demonstrated robustness of bumblebees under conditions suitable for electrophysiological recording.

Damn you Auto-Correct!

Happy Monkey;1033066 wrote:

Sleepy Bees

A booming demand for honeybees for pollination drew Potts, owner of Pottsy’s Pollination in Oregon, to load 400 hives of his bees on trucks and drive them down to California’s agricultural heartland last month. He unloaded them to a holding area just outside Yuba City and returned just a few days later to find 92 hives had been whisked away by thieves.

Clodfobble;1047337 wrote:

Those are yours, Griff?

With queens that can grow to two inches long, Asian giant hornets can use mandibles shaped like spiked shark fins to wipe out a honeybee hive in a matter of hours, decapitating the bees and flying away with the thoraxes to feed their young. For larger targets, the hornet’s potent venom and stinger — long enough to puncture a beekeeping suit — make for an excruciating combination that victims have likened to hot metal driving into their skin.

In Japan, the hornets kill up to 50 people a year. Now, for the first time, they have arrived in the United States.

Griff;1052565 wrote:

Typically bees in a strong hive run a very clean operation.

sexobon;1052853 wrote:

The difference between bees and the Borg ... hives [

sexobon;1052853 wrote:

The difference between bees and the Borg is bees can give you hives [/double entendre].

(the Borg just assimilate you into one)

Venom from honeybees has been found to rapidly kill aggressive and hard-to-treat breast cancer cells, according to potentially groundbreaking new Australian research.
The study also found when the venom's main component was combined with existing chemotherapy drugs, it was extremely efficient at reducing tumour growth in mice.
Published in the journal Nature Precision Oncology, the research was conducted at Perth's Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research by Dr Ciara Duffy as part of her PhD.
Dr Duffy hopes the discovery could lead to the development of a treatment for triple-negative breast cancer, which accounts for 10 to 15 per cent of all breast cancers and for which there are currently no clinically effective targeted therapies.

Griff;1057237 wrote:

Neat. I bet they hit that hard.