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Keep up with our Apiary!
The Hill
May 9th, 20201
A group of Dutch scientists is enlisting the help of an unusual group of participants for a new kind of rapid COVID-19 test: bees that have been specially trained to detect the virus.
Researchers at insect technology start-up InsectSense and Wageningen University in the Netherlands announced in a press release this week that they had trained more than 150 bees in a study to identify samples containing the virus that causes COVID-19 based on its scent.
The New York Times
December 7th 2020
In the last 20 years, the rusty patched bumblebee population declined by 87 percent because of habitat loss, use of pesticides and disease. This fuzzy bee, native to the continental United States, gets its name from the rusty patch on its back.
These bumblebees pollinate fruits and vegetables we eat, unlike the Gulf Coast solitary bee, which gathers pollen from only one plant — the Coastal Plain honeycomb head, a member of the aster family. You could say they’re specialists, whereas, rusty patched bumblebees and honeybees are generalists.
Honeybees — a European import to the Americas — and their colony collapse problems get a lot of attention, but native bees that have their own ecological role are facing similar and perhaps additional threats. The decline among native bees is a known problem, and there are a variety of efforts to save them; however, the full extent of the problem is not well understood.
Full Article Here
Smithsonian Magazine
October 20th, 2020
To adapt to climate change, some flowers are darkening their hue to protect themselves from the sun’s radiation, new research shows.
Around the globe, plant and animal species have tweaked their reproductive strategies, shifted their home ranges, and altered their appearance as they quickly adapt to the effects of climate change—and flowers are no exception.
A new study published in the journal Current Biology suggests that over the past 75 years, the ultraviolet (UV) pigments in flowers have increased in response to rising temperatures and a thinning ozone layer, reports Lucy Hicks for Science. Their analysis revealed that UV pigmentation went up by an average of 2 percent per year from 1941 to 2017. The flowers won’t look any different to humans, since we can’t see UV radiation, but pollinators perceive the higher levels of pigment as a darker hue, which could be confusing when they try to scope out colorful flowers to land on.
NYTimes
August 11th 2020
For a century, scientists have known how honeybees drink nectar. They lap it up.
They don’t lap like cats or dogs…but they do dip their hairy tongues rapidly in and out of syrupy nectar to draw it up into their mouth. For the last century or so, scientists have been convinced that this is the only way they drink nectar.
Scientists have now discovered bees can also suck nectar, which is more efficient when the sugar content is lower and the nectar is less viscous. High-speed video of bees drinking a nectar substitute in a lab shows that not only do honeybees have this unexpected ability, they can go back and forth from one drinking mode to another.
The Washington Post
March 14th, 2020
Bee hotels — boxes promoted as good nesting places. “Bee-friendly” farming techniques behind favorite foods.
Are the claims true — or just honey-drenched hype? Lila Westreich, a bee researcher at the University of Washington, says companies take advantage of well-intentioned consumers by “bee-washing.”
The term, first coined by researchers in 2015, refers to greenwashing, in this case a marketing strategy that makes a product or practice seem beneficial to threatened bees. (Greenwashing evolved from the term whitewashing and means an environmental spin.) In The Conversation, Westreich writes that the practice can actually hurt bees.
We have long known that honey bees shake their behinds to communicate the location of high-value flower patches to one another, a form of signaling that scientists refer to as "waggle dances."
A group of U.S. biologists has now decoded the meaning of over 1,500 of these jigs, providing conservation groups trying to boost the imperiled species' population with new insights into their dietary preferences.
America’s agricultural landscape is now 48 times more toxic to honeybees, and likely other insects, than it was 25 years ago, almost entirely due to widespread use of so-called neonicotinoid pesticides, according to a new study published today in the journal PLOS One.
This enormous rise in toxicity matches the sharp declines in bees, butterflies, and other pollinators as well as birds, says co-author Kendra Klein, senior staff scientist at Friends of the Earth US.
Last year, beekeepers reported a loss of 40% of their honeybee hives, in part due to bee-killing pesticides that agribusiness is using on the U.S.'s crops.
The Trump administration’s response has been to stop studying honeybee populations altogether, shutting down a key USDA study on the bee die-off.
The massive global bee die-off is one of the least-reported environmental catastrophes we've ever faced, and Common Dreams is one of the only news outlets from which the public and policymakers can get the facts they need.
Will you donate to help support coverage of the massive global bee die-off?
Bees pollinate one in three foods that we eat, and the die-off of natural pollinators caused by bee-killing pesticides is a serious threat to the food supply.
But instead of taking action to save the bees, the Trump administration is trying to cover up the problem.
Trump's USDA just announced that it is ending its Honey Bee Colonies report, critical research for understanding the die-off of the honeybee population. The Honey BeesColonies report tracks bee populations state by state, which is crucial for understanding where bees are dying and what factors are causing colony collapse.
The evidence has been piling up to show that pesticides in widespread use -- particularly neonicotinoids and sulfoxaflor -- are a primary factor in colony collapse. Sulfoxaflor has been found to be highly toxic to bees, even in low doses. Neonicotinoids cause bees to stop breeding and foraging for food.
But the Trump administration is rolling back restrictions on these bee-killing pesticides. Just this month, the EPA dropped restrictions on sulfoxaflor, unleashing the harmful substance on 190 million acres of U.S. farmland. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service allows the use of neonicotinoids on millions of acres in wildlife refuges.
No wonder the USDA dropped its bee study. The number of honeybee hives in the U.S. fell from six million in 1947 to less than two million today, and as long as the Trump administration allows widespread use of bee-killing pesticides, bees could die off altogether -- and the Trump administration doesn't want us to know it's happening.
Now that the USDA is no longer tracking bees, it is more important than ever that Common Dreams report on the research still being done on the threats to bees.
A team of researchers at York University has warned that the American bumblebee is facing imminent extinction from Canada, and this could lead to "cascading impacts" throughout the country. The imminent extinction classification is considered the highest and most at-risk classification before extinction.
About 42 of the more than 850 species of bees in Canada are bumblebees — important pollinators needed to grow crops, including apples, tomatoes, blueberries and legumes, as well as trees, shrubs and wildflowers.
Researchers have discovered that honey bees are able to share immunity with other bees and to their offspring in a hive by transmitting RNA 'vaccines' through royal jelly and worker jelly. The jelly is the bee equivalent of mother's milk: a secretion used to provide nutrition to worker and queen bee larvae.
The findings suggest new ways to protect bees against viruses and the deadly Varroa mite that have been responsible for the recent dramatic decline in honey bee populations. Since around one third of the human diet globally is dependent on honey bee pollination, we need solutions urgently to help maintain flourishing bee colonies, for our food security and sustainability.
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