Losses of Honey Bee Colonies Over the 2014/15 Winter

Posted September 1, 2015

Losses of Honey Bee Colonies Over the 2014/15 Winter

Preliminary results from an international study The honey bee research association COLOSS(1) has today announced the preliminary results of their international study of colony losses over the 2014-15 winter. Data were collected from 31 countries. Egypt, Russia and the Ukraine participated for the first time in this initiative, which is the largest and longest running …

Posted September 1, 2015

New Information About Stingless Bee Diversity in El Salvador

So called “stingless” bees have been managed by man in Mesoamerica since the time of the Mayan civilization, but are threatened by deforestation and urbanization, and traditional beekeeping using stingless bees has declined due to greater use of the more easily managed western honey bee. Despite this, there has hitherto been little information available about …

Posted September 1, 2015

Oriental Honey Buzzards Might Stop to Smell the Pollen

Buzzard identifies food by the pollen smell, yellow color PLOS Oriental honey buzzards, birds of prey, likely use a combination of their senses of smell and sight to identify nutritious pollen dough balls found in Taiwanese beehives, according to a study published July 15, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Shu-Yi Yang from …

Posted September 1, 2015

September 2015 Cover

Clarke Sutphin of Billings, Montana took this wonderful close-up photo of a honey bee preparing to land on a sunflower blossom. Sunflowers bloom in mid to late summer and sometimes even into fall. They provide nice honey surpluses where they are plentiful.

Posted September 1, 2015

September 2015 Table of Contents

International Honey Market Ron Phipps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …

Posted September 1, 2015

Dr. Connor Awarded Honor at HAS

At the Heartland Apicultural Society 2015 meeting in Albion, keynote speaker Dr. Lawrence John Connor received a pleasant surprise. He was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award given on behalf of the Michigan Beekeepers Association and the Heartland Apicultural Society for his work, “Mentoring the Next Generation of Queen Breeders”. A lifelong advocate of sustainable, …

Posted September 1, 2015

More on My Two-queen Hive Experiment

Our two queen system has attracted more attention than any article on bees that I have written in a long time. So many folks have read about the system and either asked about starting one or building one like it. I have encouraged all to wait and see how this system turns out before using …

Posted August 1, 2015

August 2015 Table of Contents

International Honey Market Ron Phipps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …

Posted August 1, 2015

A Comprehensive Indian Beekeeping Book

For North American beekeeping, two comprehensive texts have evolved and stood the test of time, namely well known The Hive and the Honey Bee and the ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture. Both bindings have grown thick with new information since their beginnings in the 1800’s. In India, with different honey bee species and vastly different ecosystems over …

Posted August 1, 2015

Bee Decline: Is This Anything New?

This month I’m taking an abrupt pause from my series on honey bee evolution. For my readers who have been following this story I hasten to say I will resume these monthly installations immediately. But something interesting came up this summer in the scene of Georgia agricultural politics, and I think it warrants a wider …

Losses of Honey Bee Colonies Over the 2014/15 Winter

Posted September 1, 2015