Calling all light warriors - the Bees need you!

[william r sanford72]

Even without the English you get the picture...or the BUDDHA..and its pretty wonderfull art/hive.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=37xwnnZloe0

[william r sanford72]

From modest farms to millions: Peshawar's neglected honey industry

PESHAWAR: “Saudi sheikhs are dying for bair honey,” Maaz Khan says, smiling as he pours the treasured nectar into a plate for me to taste.

Maaz sells honey at Peshawar’s Tarnab Market, a building crammed with 700 corridor-thin shops, each claiming to sell the freshest produce of honey. Plastic and glass containers of all sizes feature different types of honey, including jujube (bair), acacia modesta (palusa), acacia nilotika (kikar), oregano (sperkai), peach blossom (shaftalo), orange blossom and sun-flower.

Maaz's shop alone could serve as a single-stop haven for honey lovers. Most come to him for bair, which he says is the priciest. Palusa honey is considered the second best, but even that costs a maximum of Rs300. In comparison, bair is sold at Rs1,200 per kilogram.

“Bair is favoured for export,” Maaz says. Honey farmers and traders like him are responsible for bringing over millions of dollars to state revenue through exports. “Yet the government is yet to recognise honey trade as an industry,” he laments.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he says, provide the most lucrative markets. Almost 600 containers — each carrying over 30,000 kilograms of the country’s best honey produce — are shipped to the Gulf each year. “That amounts to almost Rs5 billion in revenue,” Maaz estimates.

During the process of honey-making, beehives can also yield by-products that are used in health food and cosmetics, like royal jelly, pollen, propolis and beeswax.

Careful nourishment

Awais Khan’s farm holds 80 beehives in a neat grid of columns and rows. As on other farms, each hive is labelled with a number and contains 70,000 to 80,000 bees.

Apiculture — the honey business — is spread out over 30,000 honeybee farms, particularly in KP. Also called apiaries, these farms contain dozens of beehives where honey is produced.

The honey comes from flower nectar of various plants. Bair trees, particularly, are abundant in KP's districts of Karak, Kohat, Dera Ismail Khan and Nizampur. The Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC) has identified four active species of honeybees locally. Only one out of them, apis mellifera, is imported and established in Pakistan.
Apiculture — the honey business — is spread out over 30,000 honeybee farms, particularly in KP. Also called apiaries, these farms contain dozens of beehives where honey is produced.

The honey comes from flower nectar of various plants. Bair trees, particularly, are abundant in KP's districts of Karak, Kohat, Dera Ismail Khan and Nizampur. The Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC) has identified four active species of honeybees locally. Only one out of them, apis mellifera, is imported and established in Pakistan.

These bees collect the nectar and break it down into simple sugar inside the honeycombs, where a thick, sweet liquid is deposited over time.

Awais has spent Rs1.5 million on the bees' nourishment so far, and his profit has been Rs3 million— twice as much.

During the months of June and July, the bees are off-season and require 150 to 200 bags of sugar for food.

Awais says bees need particular care and nourishment for efficient production. This means monitoring the weather — warm temperatures, for example, tend to yield the best produce, while severe temperatures hamper the bees’ production.

“There is nothing worse than the rainy season, or snow,” Awais says.

A migrant's trade

Today, the honey business employs over 600,000. The industry has grown considerably from its earliest days which go back to the 1978 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Around that time, refugees began crossing the border into Pakistan and many of them settled in and around Peshawar. Countless families were signing up for programmes facilitated by the United Nations Higher Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Among them was a programme for bee-keeping that provided startup equipment and training. A few bee boxes were donated to each migrant family to start their own small-scale honey business. UNHCR arranged for the bees to be imported from Australia and Italy — a fact present-day traders like Maaz Khan are quick to recount.

Today, over 75 per cent of the traders in the honey business are Afghan nationals residing in Peshawar. Sher Ghafar, a honey-exporter who has been in the business for 18 years, heeds the fact, saying the refugees have contributed to the industry's expansion across the country.

After APS

After the 2014 Peshawar Army Public School attack that killed 144 children, the government has started cracking down against refugees, particularly those from Afghanistan. The result, according to Ghafar, has had a dire impact on honey production.

Visa and work permit issues are coming in the way of a smooth honey production chain. “Proper work permits should be issued to them (refugees trading in honey) for the sake of the industry’s survival,” Ghafar insists.

In Kashmir, the movement of Afghan workers is particularly restricted. Yet some of the best honey comes from that region. What the government doesn’t realise, Ghafar says, is that the crackdown hinders the transportation of valuable beehives.

Representatives of the Honeybee Keepers Association (HKA) have pleaded to government officials on several occasions, but have had little relief. They want the KP government to recognise the honey-bee industry as a legitimate industry.

“The business will have positive impact on the province’s economy if it is recognised as an industry,” says Mohammad Qasim Naeem, President of the HKA. “But our cry hasn’t been heard.”

Javed Khattak, president of the government-run Small and Medium Enterprise Development Authority (Smeda) feels differently. He believes the government is serious in its commitment to developing honeybee technology for large scale production.

“We have been committed to installing extraction plants in Karak district,” he promised, adding that the government has requested BKA representatives to put forth their recommendations on the matter
Insufficient expertise

An average Pakistani beehive produces 10 to 15 kilograms of honey per season. In comparison, Australian bees produce 25 to 30 kgs.

Saleem Khan, who represents a union of 5,000 bee-keepers in Peshawar, says the bees' breeding conditions are to blame.

"The average life span of a normal bee is between 35 to 40 days,” Saleem says. The queen-bee, however, lives for as long as a year, and lays about 4,000 eggs each day. But Pakistan’s production is lower compared to other honey-producing countries, due to insufficient training of beekeepers and environmental threats such as deforestation.

Beekeepers and farmers generally do not have enough expertise, Saleem says, adding that some farmers do not allow beehives next to their crops, fearing that the bees will destroy those. In reality, bees assist in increasing the crop’s yield through pollination. PARC says honeybees can contribute to 80 per cent of pollination, effectively improving the quality of fruits and vegetables, and the yield of seed crops.

Other than that, severe temperatures and agricultural pesticides harm the bees’ health, but many beekeepers are not aware of this. Stagnant waters around beehives also hamper the insect's activity, and lowers the production rate every year.

The threat of climate change

Climate change, which has already affected Pakistan in the form of floods, off-season rains and severe temperatures, significantly threaten the honey bee business.

Pakistan loses over Rs6 billion every year due to climate change damage, UNDP has estimated, lower than the Rs1 billion lost each year to terrorism. The country has doubled its expenditure on combating climate change.

Large-scale deforestation being carried out by various departments and companies does not help honey production either. Maaz complains about the extensive removal of jujube honey plants in the province. “The government needs to plant more jujube trees to increase honey production,” he says.

The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf-led government announced its billion-tree tsunami drive last year, with a goal to plant one million trees in the province within the next five years. However, he says the crucially needed re-plantation of jujube trees has been starkly missing from the project

http://www.dawn.com/news/1234013

[mgray]

I have a hive due to arrive next month and doing all the prep work not to have a thriving hive this spring.

I am doing it here in suburban NYC because the past two summers my flower and vegetable gardens did not thrive because of lack of pollination.

Too many manicured lawns with pesticides to survive, perhaps. Also not many people here think its important.

[william r sanford72]

you have your work cut out mgray and the only thing I would suggest is to add another hive to the one you have coming in spring...2 is better for the odds of you keepn atleast 1 alive and a hive making it through your first year keeping em.much blessings to you and your first hive.

William

[william r sanford72]

The making of a log hive, Cévennes style - Treatment Free Tree Beekeeping in Great Britain

Matt Somerville and John Haverson demonstrate how to construct a Cevennes style Trunk Hive, in England #treebeekeeping

These trunk hives are based on a design used by members of the group ‘ L’arbre aux abeilles’ in the Cevennes National Park in France.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=S9JBvgLyVWQ

[william r sanford72]

Are There Enough Bees For The 2016 Almond Crop

Published on Jan 25, 2016
In this week’s segment of The Neonicotinoid View, host June Stoyer and Colorado beekeeper, Tom Theobald talk to commercial migratory beekeeper, Jim Doan about this year’s almond crop and whether or not there will be enough bees for pollination

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1sEDsFKfjvI

[william r sanford72]

New ARS Bee Genebank Will Preserve Genetic Diversity and Provide Breeding Resources



The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) is organizing a national bee genebank as part of the agency's response to ongoing problems facing the country's beekeepers. Average losses of managed honey bee colonies have increased to more than 30 percent per year due to pathogens, pests, parasites, and other pressures including deficient nutrition and sublethal impacts of pesticides. These stresses have threatened the continued business sustainability of commercial beekeepers.

The genebank, which will be located in Fort Collins, Colorado, will help preserve the genetic diversity of honey bees, especially for traits such as resistance to pests or diseases and pollination efficiency. It will also provide ARS and other researchers access to resources from which to breed better bees, according to entomologist Robert Danka, with the ARS Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics, and Physiology Research Unit in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Danka is helping shape the bee genebank—the Russian honey bee and Varroa Sensitive Hygiene lines developed at the Baton Rouge lab will be among those conserved first.

To help make the genebank a practical reality, ARS researchers are developing better long-term storage techniques for honey bees, including improving cryopreservation of bee sperm and embryos. Their work will include creating a way to reliably revive frozen embryos and grow them into reproductively viable adults after storage.

Another component needed to create the new genebank is a germplasm species committee, which will decide which species and subspecies to collect and preserve. ARS and Washington State University are working with beekeepers on the next steps for the committee.

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2016/160126.htm

[william r sanford72]

New Bee Germplasm Collection

This is the first in a series of articles about plant, animal, arthropod, parasite, and microbial collections.

Like the great storehouses of the past, full of amassed treasures, the Agricultural Research Service’s germplasm collections today preserve a wealth of genetic material, which is a critical national and international resource. These collections fall into three general categories: small, individual research collections; reference collections; and large, national, genetic-resource collections. Their value to scientists, breeders, agriculture, and indeed all of us, is almost beyond measure.

This year brings a new ARS germplasm collection: The National Bee Genebank in Fort Collins, Colorado. It is part of ARS’s response to the ongoing crisis that the country’s beekeepers are facing. In the past three decades or so, new pathogens, pests, parasites, and pressures, such as sublethal impacts of pesticides and deficient nutrition, have increased average losses of managed honey bee colonies to more than 30 percent a year. These stresses have helped push commercial beekeepers to a precarious economic position, threatening their continued business sustainability.

The addition of an ARS bee collection will ensure that genetically diverse honey bee germplasm will be preserved for traits such as resistance to particular pests or diseases and for pollination efficiency. The genebank can help ARS and other researchers around the country to breed better bees now and in the future.

“For example, once the genebank is organized, it will ensure that the Russian honey bee and the Varroa Sensitive Hygiene lines we developed here are kept safe. It will also provide greater access to them for other researchers without requiring our lab to spend so many resources to maintain colonies of these lines,” says entomologist Robert Danka, with the ARS Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics, and Physiology Research Unit in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Danka is helping to shape the bee genebank.

To help make the genebank a reality, researchers in the ARS Insect Genetics and Biochemistry Research Unit in Fargo, North Dakota, are developing better long-term storage techniques for honey bees, including cryopreservation of bee sperm and embryos. Their work will include creating a way to reliably revive the embryos and grow them into reproductively viable adults after storage. The lab has had success developing such protocols for other insect species. When this research is complete, it will allow honey bee germplasm to be preserved for the long term outside of living colonies.
The other component of creating a new collection requires forming a “germplasm species committee” to decide what species and subspecies need to be collected and preserved and who will have access to particular parts of the collection.

“We are working with the bee program at Washington State University to talk to beekeepers—especially to prominent queen breeders, and to researchers from universities and private industry—about how this committee should be organized and what needs to be in the collection,” said Danka. “Many honey bee lines have been developed by private companies, and while we want them and their genes preserved for the future, access has legal aspects that have to be respected.”

Deciding what will be collected in the National Bee Genebank, beyond the initial lines ARS has, could be a very large job. First, there are the honey bees, which are not native to the New World; they were brought here by Europeans starting in the 1600s. Today, most U.S. beekeepers are only managing one subspecies of honey bee: the Italian Apis mellifera ligustica,thought to have originated south of the Alps and north of Sicily.

But there are perhaps two dozen other subspecies in the wild that are not used as widely here commercially. In Europe, for example, they also extensively use the Carniolan honey bee (Apis mellifera carnica), originally from Slovenia. Importing and storing germplasm from these types of foreign populations can provide long-term opportunities for researchers and industry to develop new bee varieties as they deem appropriate.

“Once the collecting and storage of honey bee germplasm is under way, there will be a need to determine how to approach collecting and storing other pollinators, such as the non-Apis bees,” says geneticist Harvey D. Blackburn, who oversees the ARS National Animal Germplasm Program in Fort Collins, which also curates livestock, aquatic species, and other insect germplasm. The new bee collection will be housed there too, beginning with existing cryopreserved germplasm samples from ARS laboratories or from universities.—By J. Kim Kaplan, Agricultural Research Service Information Staff.

http://agresearchmag.ars.usda.gov/2016/jan/bees/

[william r sanford72]

Beekeeper Who Sounded Alarm on Colony Collapse Disorder Loses 90 Percent of His Hives

David Hackenberg, who first announced the phenomenon now known as 'Colony Collapse Disorder' (CCD) back in late 2006, has lost 90 percent of his bees. Again.

"We've lost our bees before, but it's never been this bad," says 43-year-old Davey Hackenberg who now runs Buffy Bee, his father's East Coast operation. The father-and-son team went from 1700 hives at the beginning of winter to a little less than 300. And for the first time in years, they're not driving cross-country to the Central Valley to pollinate almonds. They don't have enough bees. Many commercial beekeepers depend on the lucrative almonds – a 6.5 billion dollar crop that spans 500 miles—to stay in business.

Bret Adee, the biggest beekeeper in the world, also recently lost a massive amount of hives. He went from 90,000 hives to 40,000. This is not the first time Bret has lost a big part of his operation.

"We haven't seen any of this colony collapse disorder here," Adee first stated back in 2007, during the filming of my award-winning documentary, Vanishing of the Bees, narrated by Ellen Page. We interviewed Adee beside his 70,000 hives in Lost Hills. But a few months later, he returned to discover the largest disaster ever seen in bee-keeping history — 40,000 hives containing two billion bees had disappeared. The event became known as a 'bee holocaust.'

EPA Sued Over Failed Oversight of Neonicotinoid-Coated Seeds

Hackenberg and Adee continue to try to save their bees. They, along with other beekeepers, farmers, and sustainable agriculture and conservation groups, such as Center for Food Safety (CFS), filed a lawsuit in the early part of January 2016, challenging the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) inadequate regulation of the neonicotinoid insecticide seed coatings used on dozens of crops.
"As a beekeeper for over 50 years, I have lost more colonies of honey bees in the last 10 years from the after-effects of neonic seed coatings than all others causes over the first 40 plus years of my beekeeping operation," says Hackenberg.

The lawsuit argues that the EPA has illegally allowed widespread environmental contamination to occur from the use of pesticide-coated seeds, without requiring the seeds to be registered under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). "Because the coated seeds are not registered, there are no enforceable labels on the seed bags and no adequate assessments of serious ongoing environmental harm," explains Abigail Seiler, CFS Media and Communications Manager.

Learn More About the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3QceID-Vb64

The EPA has essentially skirted the law and not registered these coated seeds thanks to a specific exemption, called "treated article," which allows the EPA to eliminate "all provisions of FIFRA." This in turn relieves the EPA of accountability and their duty to require registration of neonicotinoid-coated seeds.

"Because of a major regulatory loophole, neonicotinoid seed coatings are being used without adequate safety testing, proper data gathering, or necessary product labeling," adds Larissa Walker, CFS Pollinator Program Director.

The truth is that beekeepers cannot afford the three to five years it will continue to take if the EPA chooses to 'drag out' the treated article exemption in courts at the request of the pesticide industry. They need them to properly regulate these pesticides today.

"People need pollinated food; somebody must stand up and say no to unregulated killing of pollinators," says Jeff Anderson, beekeeper and lead plaintiff in the case.

The Insidious Nature of Neonics

Neonicotinoids are a class of insecticides considered to be a major factor in overall bee population declines and poor health. They are also the most commonly used insecticides in the world. Up to 95 percent of the applied seed coating ends up in the surrounding air, soil, and water rather than in the crop for which it was intended, leading to extensive contamination.

CCD is not a random & undefined "disorder" but a direct result of these poisons that have been wreaking havoc on our environment for already more than two decades. And yet, manufacturers like Bayer and Syngenta, along with the EPA, are still denying their effects, despite a growing body of science and empirical observations from beekeepers around the world.
Neonics also harm birds, bats, monarchs, and other vital pollinators. They have been found coursing through our blood and now researchers are even finding neonics in the liver belonging to deers, and maybe even pheasants, muskrats, elk, and moose.

These poisons can stay in our soil for up to 18 years and their metabolites are even more dangerous than the parent compounds. They kill worms and other microorganisms and compromise our soil's overall health.

All this as the European Academies Science Advisory Council concludes that neonics have severe effects on the pollinators and organisms that provide natural pest control.

Neonics are up to 10,000 times more dangerous that DDT. Enough said.

Pushing Farmers to Use Poisonous Seeds

Treated seeds are very common. EPA has allowed millions of pounds of coated seeds to be planted annually on more than 150 million acres nationwide. Think corn and soy. Not only are those seeds coated with poisons, they are also genetically modified.

EPA's actions surrounding neonicotinoid seed coatings have led to intensifying and destructive consequences, says lawsuit and CFS attorney Peter T. Jenkins.

According to an article in Civil Eats, most major companies do not even offer uncoated corn seed.
And it's not like there are many to choose from. Four of the largest seed companies, one of them being Monsanto, control nearly 60 percent of the global patented seed market, according to Mary Hendrickson of the University of Missouri. This fact constrains farmers' choices.

"Meanwhile, seed treated companies include incentives to buy coated seed in the form of insurance: If their crop fails, the farmer will get a 100 percent rebate. Without the coatings, the rebate is only 50 to 75 percent," adds the same article.

"That's one of the reasons we throw everything on the seed," Matt Hughes, a farmer, told Progressive Farmer."

Treated seeds are so popular and yet their cost-effectiveness has been challenged in recent years, with numerous studies indicating that their near ubiquitous use is unnecessary — and making EPA's disregard of their risks all the more harmful.

"EPA can't bury its head in the sand any longer. Seed coatings are just the latest delivery device of pesticide corporations that pose a threat to pollinators and the food system," says Marcia Ishii- Eiteman, senior scientist at Pesticide Action Network. "Given widespread use and persistence of these bee-harming pesticides, it's time for EPA to fully and swiftly evaluate the impacts of seed coatings — and prevent future harm."

The plaintiffs in the case are beekeepers Jeff Anderson, Bret Adee, David Hackenberg, and Pollinator Stewardship Council, farmers Lucas Criswell and Gail Fuller, and public interest and conservation groups American Bird Conservancy, Center for Food Safety and Pesticide Action Network of North America.

How much longer will these poisons be allowed on the market?

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...0-of-his-hives

[william r sanford72]

Anarchy,.....in the hive.

Queen bees put their workers on ‘the pill’ to stop them reproducing

You probably already know that social insects, such as bees, ants and wasps, have sterile workers and one queen that does all the hard work when it comes to laying eggs.

But this presents something of an evolutionary conundrum. After all, why would a female worker give up her opportunity to reproduce and instead help her mother, the queen, produce more offspring?

It was only in the 1960s that this evolutionary conundrum was solved. Biologist Bill Hamilton used mathematical modelling to show that genes that reduce the fertility of workers can spread in a population, provided that they enhance the reproductive fitness of their relatives that share the same gene.

However, even half a century after Hamilton, no one had figured out the genetic basis of honey bee worker sterility. It was a bit like the hunt for the Higgs-Boson: we knew that these genetic pathways had to exist, but identifying one was proving difficult.

But now, in research we’ve recently published in the Molecular Biology and Evolution and Journal of Insect Physiology, we think we have found an answer.
Anarchy in the hive

The story goes back more than 20 years, when one of us (Ben), through his work with local beekeepers, found a mutant anarchistic strain of honey bee where the workers were reproductive, even though the queen was present.

Ben used a DNA fingerprinting technique to show that the workers were reproductive and that they all had the same father. Ben’s research showed that worker reproduction has a genetic basis.

We realised we could use this mutant honey bee to uncover the underlying genetics of worker fertility, by comparing the mutant workers to normal workers. When we did so, we found a gene that differed between the two strains of honey bee, and which seemed to be the strongest candidate for influencing whether the workers were reproductive or not.

We called the gene Anarchy, after the mutant from which it was identified.

We found that the expression of the gene Anarchy is more than twice as high in workers with deactivated ovaries (i.e. no mature eggs present in ovary) compared to workers with activated ovaries (i.e. mature eggs present in ovary). In addition, we found that the expression of the Anarchy gene predicts the ovary state of workers with almost 90% accuracy.

Interestingly, expression of the Anarchy gene goes up if a worker is exposed to a queen. This discovery proved to be the linchpin.
In a normal honey bee colony, the queen secretes a pheromone that inhibits ovary activation in the worker. And if the queen dies, the workers can activate their ovaries and lay eggs.

Even though workers cannot mate or store sperm, they can produce viable male offspring due to the sex determination system of honey bees (haplodiploidy).

So it appears that the queen controls reproduction in her workers by manipulating the expression of Anarchy via her pheromone.

The Buffy connection

While the Anarchy gene is found in many different organisms, very little is known about it. What was exciting for us is that Anarchy belongs to a protein family that is associated with a process termed programmed cell death (more colloquially called “cell suicide”). We already knew that programmed cell death causes the eggs to degenerate in the ovaries of workers exposed to queen pheromone.

To prove that the gene Anarchy interacts with the programmed cell death pathway, we manipulated its expression using a technique called RNA interference. When we did so, we found that Anarchy interacts with the programmed cell death regulator gene named Buffy (yes, this gene is named after the TV heroine).
A further experiment revealed that expression of Anarchy localises to the degenerating eggs in the worker’s ovaries. Therefore the Anarchy gene is in the right place to cause the death of the eggs.

Bees on the pill

So a honey bee worker in the presence of the queen is similar to a woman who is on the contraceptive pill. In both these situations, the female is not irreversibly sterile and the process is under external control.

Workers continually produce eggs. But when queen pheromone is present, the eggs are aborted early in their development.

Our findings have also helped us to understand how worker sterility evolved. Queen pheromone seems to have co-opted a mechanism that is already present in many insects. For example, starve a female fruit fly and she aborts her eggs in the exact same way as a honey bee worker does in the presence of a queen.

Social insects are remarkable creatures because of their massively social and highly altruistic behaviour. With the discovery of the role that Anarchy plays in worker sterility, we finally have a better mechanistic understanding of what makes these insects so unique.

http://theconversation.com/queen-bee...roducing-50316

[william r sanford72]

Will Bee Losses Impact Food Security?

Published on Feb 3, 2016

Will Bee Losses Impact Food Security? Without honeybees, many of the foods we enjoy will not be available. It is the beginning of 2016 and the bee losses are tremendous. Commercial migratory beekeepers are having a difficult time preparing for the almond crop pollination. Will there be enough bees to pollinate the first and largest crop in America? How will this impact food security?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hh7zxRNo62U

[william r sanford72]

Bumblebees Their Ecology and Conservation

Published on Feb 2, 2016
A lecture given by Dave Goulson at the 2015 National Honey Show entitled "Bumblebees Their Ecology and Conservation".

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hTnEW-wEf5M

[william r sanford72]

Sustainability of Honey Bees
Published on Feb 3, 2016

A lecture given by Debbie Delaney at the 2015 National Honey Show entitled "The Sustainability of Honeybees". The National Honey Show gratefully acknowledge the Nineveh Charitable Trust for their support and the sponsorship by the British Beekeepers Association.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6JWjtDTBxiQ

[Cidersomerset]

Spread of bee disease 'largely manmade'

By Helen Briggs
BBC News

5 February 2016
From the section Science & Environment



Bee infected with the virus

The global trade in bees is driving a pandemic that threatens hives and wild bees,
UK scientists say.A deadly bee disease has spread worldwide through imports of
infected honeybees, according to genetic evidence.Stricter controls are needed to
protect bees from other emerging diseases, researchers report in Science journal.
The virus together with the Varroa mite can kill-off whole hives, putting bee
populations at risk.Lead researcher Dr Lena Bayer-Wilfert of the University of Exeter
said European bees are at the heart of the global spread of what she calls a
"double blow" for colonies.

"This is clearly linked to the human movement of honeybee colonies around the globe,
" she told BBC News. "It shows a piece of evidence we can't argue with." 'Major threat'
The pattern of the spread shows the movement of the virus around the world is manmade
rather than natural, say scientists.

Varroa mites (red spot) on a honeybeeImage copyright University of Hawaii

Varroa mites (red spot) on a honeybee

Co-researcher Prof Roger Butlin of the University of Sheffield said Deformed Wing Virus
(DWV) was a major threat to honeybee populations across the world with the epidemic
"driven by the trade and movement of honeybee colonies".

In the research, scientists at the University of Exeter, Sheffield and Salford tracked the
emergence of DWV by analysing genetic samples from honeybees and Varroa mites in
32 locations of 17 countries.They found that the epidemic largely spread from Europe to
North America and countries such as New Zealand, with the European honeybee as the
main transmitter.Prof Stephen Martin of the University of Salford said the combination
of the virus and the mite were at the heart of the crash in honeybee populations.

"It supports the idea that DWV is the main cause for the colony losses associated with
Varroa and that this comes from European bees," he said.Scientists believe the combination
is particularly deadly because the parasite feeds on bee larvae, while also injecting the deadly
virus into the body of grown bees.

The double threat is thought to have wiped out millions of honeybee colonies over recent decades.

Strict limits

The researchers are calling for tighter controls on importing honeybees, such as mandatory
health screenings and more checks on movements across borders.And they say every effort
should be made to stop Varroa entering the few areas that are free of the mite to provide a
refuge for conservation purposes.Dr Bayer-Wilfert added: "We must now maintain strict limits
on the movement of bees, whether they are known to carry Varroa or not."

Commenting on the study, Prof Mark Brown of Royal Holloway University of London said there
were already trade controls in place for honeybees - such as checks by vets - but these were
clearly not sufficient.

"We need better regulation if we want to stop this happening in the future for other viruses that
are likely to emerge," he said.The European honeybee is used worldwide for commercial pollination
of crops such as nuts and fruit as well as for honey production.

Follow Helen on Twitter.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35484763

[william r sanford72]

Why Genetics are Important to the BeeKeeper
Published on Feb 3, 2016

A lecture given by Debbie Delaney at the 2015 National Honey Show entitled "Why Genetics are Important to the BeeKeeper". The National Honey Show gratefully acknowledge the Nineveh Charitable Trust for their support and the sponsorship by Bee Farmers Association.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=w2sjccgWZcY

[william r sanford72]

Good News for the Western Bumble Bee, Bombus occidentalis

Bombus occidentalis used to be the most common bumble bee species in the Pacific Northwest, but in the mid 1990s it became one of the rarest. The reason or reasons for the species decline remain unsolved, but one possibility points to a fungal pathogen known as Nosema bombi.
Whatever the causes were for the decline, an article in the Journal of Insect Science offers some good news for the bee.

“The population seems at least to be re-emerging where it hadn’t been seen in the last 10 years,” said James Strange, one of several co-authors and a researcher at the USDA’s Pollinating Insects Research Unit at Utah State University. “There is some resilience in the population of Bombus occidentalis. They do seem to be coming back.”

The researchers sampled sites from the San Juan Islands and the Olympic Peninsula to northern Idaho and northeast Oregon. They excluded the dry central region of Washington because Bombus occidentalis is not usually found in such areas. Its natural habitat is typically wetter areas.

In addition to the wild populations, Bombus occidentalis was once used to pollinate crops in greenhouses.

“They were raised in large numbers commercially and shipped around to greenhouses,” said lead author Paul Rhoades, a graduate research fellow at the University of Idaho, who notes that the Nosema bombi pathogen might have been in the bees’ semen and transmitted within the bee colonies. “Some of the individuals might have escaped and spread the parasite,” he said.

The bee is no longer used commercially in greenhouses, but in the wild it pollinates a large variety of plants. It is a generalist, pollinating a range of crops including pumpkins, raspberries, apples, cherries, and canola, among others.
According to Dr. Strange, the Nosema parasite might have been a factor in the bee’s decline, but whether it’s the sole factor remains an open question. Trying to better understand the impact of Nosema on Bombus occidentalis is difficult, he said, because laboratory studies are hard to do.

“When we try to raise the bees in captivity, they die, so we can’t do a lot of experimental work to show that this is really the thing [killing bees],” he said. “We have a lot of correlation, but we can never get the species without the pathogen. We can’t clean this pathogen out.”

“If you look at [bumble bee] populations up in Alaska, they have Nosema, but they are present in fairly high abundance,” Rhoades said. “There’s also evidence that there’s genetically distinct populations that are in northern British Columbia and Alaska compared to the northwestern part of the United States and southern British Columbia.”

The study’s findings raise the question of why the population decline appears to have stopped. Dr. Strange’s answer is “evolution.”

The pathogen’s virulence may have declined. If the pathogen wipes out its host, “that’s clearly not in the best interest of the pathogen,” he said.

Another possibility is that some individuals of Bombus occidentalis are able to resist the pathogen, “and that’s probably more of what’s going on,” said Strange.

So what will the future of Bombus occidentalis in the Pacific Northwest look like? It’s a fairly large concern, according to Rhoades.

“What we seem to detect is that there are bees in northern Idaho and some in the Olympic Peninsula, and there are very few if any in the intervening region. That raises the problem of a lack of gene flow between these populations. If there aren’t immigrants, there’s a whole host of problems associated with the lack of genetic diversity and inbreeding.”

http://entomologytoday.org/2016/02/0...-occidentalis/

[Cidersomerset]

Minnesota lawmakers consider banning neonicotinoid pesticides decimating bees and the environment

By David on 8th February 2016



‘Like people in other states across the U.S., Minnesotans are concerned about their declining
honeybee populations, and are pushing state regulators to take action. In October, the state
Department of Agriculture released an outline on the study of neonicotinoids, a class of
neuro-active insecticides similar to nicotine that are killing beneficial insects like honeybees.

The state’s overview of neonics quickly drew criticism, as the study did not include the possibility
of banning the chemicals, according to a report by the StarTribune. More than 400 upset citizens
wrote the agency, complaining that the study made no mention of banning the chemicals, despite
their known adverse environmental effects.

“Obviously people are very interested in this,” said Gregg Regimbal, an official with the department’s
Pesticide and Fertilizer Management Division. “It’s a very complex issue and it’s highly charged.”‘

Read more: Minnesota lawmakers consider banning neonicotinoid pesticides decimating bees and
the environment.


http://www.naturalnews.com/052893_ne...innesota.html#

[william r sanford72]

Feel the buzz: the album recorded by 40,000 bees
He’s drummed with Spiritualized and Julian Cope. Now Kev Bales has joined up with Wolfgang Buttress and a beehive – to create a transcendental drone symphony

“We had a joke in the studio that they were the best band members we’ve ever had,” laughs Kev Bales when describing the recording of Be’s One album. Bales may have spent the last 30 years drumming with the likes of Spiritualized, Soulsavers and Julian Cope, but the musicians he’s referring to here are a different kind of buzz band altogether: to be precise, they’re 40,000 bees, and their activity forms the basis of One, a transcendental drone symphony between man and bee that is surely one of the year’s most beguiling offerings.

To understand where it all came from requires a bit of backstory. So let’s begin at the Expo 2015 exhibition in Milan, where Nottingham-based artist Wolfgang Buttress has been chosen to represent the UK and build a pavilion under the theme “feeding the planet”. He’s decided to base his structure around the honeybee – responsible for 30% of the food we eat, yet threatened by pesticides and a lack of biodiversity – and sets to work constructing The Hive, a 50-tonne, 17-metre-high lattice structure for people to wander around. It’s an impressive concept, but Buttress feels that, to truly convey the honeybee’s plight, it needs something more.
“Have you ever been to a hive?” asks Buttress, when we meet for coffee in London. “The first time you lift them out there’s this incredible, visceral hum. I thought it might just be an irritating bzzzzzz sound, but it’s so low it just kind of gets you.”


The hive in question belonged to Dr Martin Bencsik of Nottingham Trent University. Bencsik is an expert in bee communication who has developed ways to measure their activity – from docile morning periods to frantic afternoons – by placing vibration sensors inside their hives. After his first meeting with Bencsik, Buttress had a brainwave: by transmitting a live stream of the hive’s activity from Nottingham to Milan, he would be able to reflect the daily life of a bee in real-time using a series of LED lights placed throughout his giant hive.

That was all well and good, visually speaking, but what about a soundtrack? Buttress set out to form a band that could play alongside the deep buzz he’d been so affected by. He already knew Bales and his longtime bandmate Tony Foster, but serendipity played a part too: it turned out Bencsik’s wife Deirdre was a classically trained cellist. She worked out that the bees were buzzing in the key of C, and went about adorning their drone with resonant swathes of cello while Buttress’s teenage daughter Camille improvised some vocals. Watching all this unfold at the first rehearsal, Bales realised straight away that they were on to something magical. Yet it was also completely different to anything he’d done before.
“We kept saying: ‘Let’s try putting this in,’ but we realised that the more space we left for the bees, the better it sounded,” he says. “We kept cranking them up higher and higher in the mix.”


“Too many human instruments sounded wrong,” agrees Buttress. “You had to get the balance right between bee and musician. At one point we tried some free-form Coltrane drums but it just took over. If you play too much the hypnotic trance is gone”

Listen to the full album of Be: One http://soundcloud.com/caughtbytheriv...eone-1/s-ElWlq

Maintaining this trance without the aid of traditional cues such as time signatures or choruses requires focus and restraint – qualities in short supply in 2016’s cultural landscape. Which makes One not just a great record, but a statement on modern life itself. Buttress agrees: “It’s about listening rather than dictating. Trying to tune in and find harmony, where you’re working with something rather than against it. Humans like to think that they’re always in control but we should be learning to let go sometimes. It can be hard to do that but also quite liberating.”
As the sessions progressed, Buttress had another idea. If the hive vibrations could be used to influence the LED lights, then why not use them to help influence the soundtrack too? The musicians set to work recording a library of different musical stems – from plangent chords of lap steel to splashes of Mellotron – and Wolfgang and Bencsik devised a system using noise gates that could be triggered to play whenever the hive was acting in a certain way. In this way the bees would, quite literally, be playing the music.


This multi-sensory picture of a bee’s activity struck a chord with the judges in Milan, who awarded The Hive with the gold medal. The resulting album One can be considered an equal triumph – a curated version of these sonic explorations that stays true to the transcendental spirit of the original project (especially opener The Journey: a meditative, 19-minute epic). Bales and Foster even persuaded Spiritualized linchpin Jason Pierce to add guitar, harmonica and autoharp in his home studio, while use was made of the many different bee sounds Bencsik has identified.

“It’s not just buzzing, but also these specific toots and quacks and purrs,” marvels Bales. “I couldn’t believe that some of these sounds came from a bee, they’re far more musical than I expected.”

While Buttress continues his bee adventures – one current project involves setting up a hive in a broken cello; another involves Bencsik translating musical sound into vibrations that the bees can sense – there are plenty of opportunities opening up. The Hive is set to be reconstructed in Kew Gardens from June. And Be will be performing One for the first time later this month in Nottingham, with the aim of bringing the show to festivals such as End of the Road and Glastonbury. Not bad for a band that comprises an artist, a scientist, a classically trained cellist, a 14-year-old girl, half of Spiritualized and 40,000 insects. In fact, when you see that written down, it does make you wonder: are they the most unusual group in pop history?

Bales has a think for a few seconds: “Well, if we’re not, I’m definitely going to see the other band,” he laughs.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/201...theatre-be-one


The music above is wonderfull if you can give it a listen.. posted about this art work awhile back...so to add perspective...

Exclusive Interview with Dr. Martin Bencsik and Wolfgang Buttress

Published on Jun 16, 2015

A special Skype interview recorded with Dr. Martin Bencsik, physicist of Nottingham Trent University, whose research inspired the concept of the UK Pavilion and Wolfgang Buttress, designer of the UK Pavilion at the Milan Expo 2015.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ie_aZ7Lqac4

[Cidersomerset]

Related article.......

Man patents natural, non-toxic pesticide that could make many agricultural chemicals obsolete

By David on 10th February 2016



‘Back in 2006, one of the world’s foremost mycologists secured a patent that, once fully developed,
could shatter the power of the pesticide industry. This would be a major setback not just for
manufacturers of chemical poisons like Dow, but also for companies like Monsanto that genetically
modify crops to produce the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) pesticide in their tissues.

In a nutshell, mycologist and permaculture advocate Paul Stamets has discovered a chemical-free
method to trick insects into gathering, stockpiling and eating insect-killing (entomopathogenic) fungi,
which then take over their bodies and devour them.

Although only 1 to 5 percent of the world’s one million identified insect species are considered pests,
an enormous industry has grown up around using chemicals to poison them. These poisons have
wreaked havoc on the health of humans, animals and entire ecosystems.’

Read more: Man patents natural, non-toxic pesticide that could make many agricultural chemicals obsolete

http://www.naturalnews.com/052911_na...ernatives.html

[william r sanford72]

Extreme Temperatures During Shipping Can Affect Honey Bee Queens’ Reproductive Abilities

Many beekeepers order honey bee queens from breeders, who ship them to the beekeepers by mail. According to an article in the journal PLOS One, high temperatures during shipping and elevated pathogen levels may be contributing to honey bee queens failing faster today than they did in the past.

“Either stress individually or in combination could be part of the reason beekeepers have reported having to replace queens about every six months in recent years when queens have generally lasted one to two years,” said entomologist Jeff Pettis, a USDA-ARS entomologist and one of the co-authors.

Queens only mate in the first few weeks of their lives, and they use the stored semen to fertilize eggs for the rest of their lives. Queen failure occurs when the queen dies or when the queen does not produce enough viable eggs to maintain the adult worker population in the colony. Replacing queens cost about $15 each, a significant cost per colony for beekeepers.

Commercial beekeepers usually order their replacement queens already mated, and the queens are shipped to apiaries from March through October. Pettis and his colleagues wondered whether temperature extremes during shipping could damage the sperm a queen has stored in her body, so they conducted a lab experiment and found that inseminated queens exposed to temperatures of 104 °F (40 °C) for 1-2 hours or to 41 °F (5 °C) for 1-4 hours had sperm viability drop to 20 percent from about 90 percent.
In real-world testing, queens were shipped from California, Georgia and Hawaii to their lab in Maryland by either U.S. Postal Service Priority Mail or United Parcel Service Next Day Delivery in July and September, and the packages contained thermometers that recorded the temperature every 10 minutes. The researchers found that as many as 20 percent of the shipments experienced temperature spikes that approached extremes of 105.8 °F and 46.4 °F for more than two hours at a time. Those exposed to extreme high or low temperatures during shipping had sperm viability reduced by 50 percent.

“The good news is with fairly simple improvements in packaging and shipping conditions, we could have a significant impact on improving queens and, in turn, improving colony survival,” Pettis said.

The researchers also assessed queens that were sent to them by beekeepers, and almost all of them had a high incidence of deformed wing virus; Nosema ceranae was the next most commonly found pathogen.

Beekeepers were asked to rate the performance of each colony from which a queen came as either in good or poor health, and a clear link was found between colonies rated as better performing and queens with higher sperm viability. Poorer performing colonies strongly correlated to queens with lower sperm viability.

“We saw wide variation in both pathogen levels and sperm viability in the queens that were sent in to us, and sometimes between queens from the same apiary in July and September, so there is still more research to do. But getting queens back to lasting two years may well be one of the links in getting our beekeeping industry back to a sustainable level,” Pettis said."

Read more at:

– Colony Failure Linked to Low Sperm Viability in Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) Queens and an Exploration of Potential Causative Factors
http://entomologytoday.org/2016/02/1...ey-bee-queens/