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3:36am
June 15, 2015
Year of Pollination: More than Honey, etc.
Year of Pollination: More than Honey, etc.
When I decided to spend a year writing about pollinators and pollination, I specifically wanted to focus on pollinators besides the honey bee. Honey bees already get lots of attention, and there are loads of other pollinating organisms that are equally fascinating. But that’s just the thing, honey bees are incredibly fascinating. They have a strict and complex social structure, and they make…
17 notes
7:18pm
April 20, 2015
h e lp me
I can’t remember exactly where I heard about “telling the bees” but it has stuck in my head forever.
This is adorable.
I heard of it somewhere too, but can’t remember where at all.
4:43am
September 27, 2014
A great addition to your garden or back yard. - Bee watering station.
Bees need water just like we do but often times drown in open water. To make a bee watering station you can either do what is shown in the photo above and fill the bowl of a dog/cat watering jug with stones or you can fill a small dish with marbles and add water to that. That way the bees have something to land on!
KELLI
YES. I need to start a bee sanctuary.
This is a cool idea!
Definitely a great idea to have a constant-feed waterer!! Fill it with stones/small rocks/marbles, even packing peanuts - just give them enough of an island to land on and stay dry so they can get a sip. :)
US Residents, Check out:
Pollinator.org for more references, info, and ideas on how to help our pollinator friends!
11:36am
September 14, 2014
“Bees are the smallest of birds. They are born from the bodies of oxen, or from the decaying flesh of slaughtered calves; worms form in the flesh and then turn into bees. Bees live in community, choose the most noble among them as king, have wars, and make honey. Their laws are based on custom, but the king does not enforce the law; rather the lawbreakers punish themselves by stinging themselves to death. Bees are afraid of smoke and are excited by noise. Each has its own duty: guarding the food supply, watching for rain, collecting dew to make honey, and making wax from flowers.”
8:07pm
August 19, 2014
Bee and Lavender done by Luci at Tatouage Royal in Montreal.
plan on gttin a tattoo not exactly like this but similar kindda
4:06am
August 17, 2014
The incredible honey hunters of the Himalayan foothills
by Bec Crew
Twice a year, locals in central Nepal risk their lives high up in the Himalayan foothills to harvest honey produced by the world’s largest honeybee.
Growing up to 3 cm (1.2 in) in length, the Himalayan cliff honey bee of Nepal is the world’s largest honeybee.
Found only in the foothills of the Himalayas, building their homes at altitudes of between 2,500 and 3,000 m (8,200 and 9,800 ft) and foraging as high up as 4,100 m (13,500 ft) above the ground, these insects have a unique ability to thrive at incredible heights.
The Himalayan cliff honey bee is the only species in the world to produce a type of honey called red spring honey, and it cannot be reproduced by commerical beekeepers due to the high altitudes that give it its unique properties. Said to be “intoxicating and relaxing”, red spring honey is understandably very valuable, and twice a year, honey hunters from the Gurung population of Nepal risk their lives to harvest it up in the foothills…
(read more: Science Alert! - Australia and New Zealand)
photo by Andrew Newey
7:51am
July 5, 2014
I’ve been experimenting with bees and gold ink! Also my scanner crapped out, which is just as well because the ink looks better photographed than scanned.
3:34pm
June 8, 2014
➸ Report: Honeybee Death Rate is Currently too High for Survival of the Species
A government report released last week surprisingly admits that the honeybee species are dying off at a rate too high to ‘guarantee their long term survival’.
It has been well proven that the primary factor leading to this extinction is the presence of neonicotinoid poisons, of course present in insecticides sold by and/or used by corporations such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, Dupont and their products. A recent study from Harvard, published on March 27th of this year, has definitively confirmed what scientists outside the US have been saying for years: neonicotinoids are the [emphasis added] cause of colony collapse disorder(CCD). The study showed that 50% of colonies populated by bees who had been in contact with these pesticides collapsed, compared to only 1 in 6 who were not in contact with neonicotinoids.
The European Union understands that the death of honeybees is an unprecedented death for human beings and mother earth, as they have banned neonicotinoid poisons.
However, American powers refuse to believe the problem is neonicotinoid insecticides and they continue to be in use here.
These corporations with armies of lobbyists and politicians bought and paid for, like Monsanto, are playing dumb and suggesting that ‘mites’ are the cause for the death rate of honeybees, a problem so bad that it means their extinction if they continue on this path. This is dangerous anti-science rhetoric, borderline scientific denialism from the American agro-chemical establishment.
Well, did mites cause the honeybees to go extinct in the approximate 14 million years they survived here before humans invented neonicotinoid chemicals? Of course not. It seems only things as foreign to Earth as neonicotinoids can cause such a drastic loss of crucial life on our planet and the solution is obvious; inform people that if we keep allowing the honeybees to die at this rate, we will be literally without almost all of the fruits we enjoy. Oh and stop using neonicotinoids.
If we don’t seriously stop this soon, then a corporation like Monsanto would likely take advantage of the lack of bees to pollinate and create fruit, and attempt to monopolize the products of nature because the fruits will then require individual, manual pollination or more complex measures. While this may seem far fetched, in the absence of honeybees and acknowledging that manual pollination is highly labor intensive, micro pollinator drones may be in our future if something is not done to save the bees.
If you are reading this, there is a good chance absolutely none of this information is new. If the bees are not nursed back to health as a species, say goodbye to these things- (unless you want genetically modified, manually pollinated products of Monsanto in the wake of the extinction of the honeybee): Apples Mangos Rambutan Kiwi Fruit Plums Peaches Nectarines Guava Rose Hips Pomegranites Pears Black and Red Currants Alfalfa Okra Strawberries Onions Cashews Cactus Prickly Pear Apricots Allspice Avocados Passion Fruit Lima Beans Kidney Beans Adzuki Beans Green Beans Orchid Plants Custard Apples Cherries Celery Coffee Walnut Cotton Lychee Flax Acerola – used in Vitamin C supplements Macadamia Nuts Sunflower Oil Goa beans Lemons Buckwheat Figs Fennel Limes Quince Carrots Persimmons Palm Oil Loquat Durian Cucumber Hazelnut Cantaloupe Tangelos Coriander Caraway Chestnut Watermelon Star Apples Coconut Tangerines Boysenberries Starfruit Brazil Nuts Beets Mustard Seed Rapeseed Broccoli Cauliflower Cabbage Brussels Sprouts Bok Choy (Chinese Cabbage) Turnips Congo Beans Sword beans Chili peppers, red peppers, bell peppers, green peppers Papaya Safflower Sesame Eggplant Raspberries Elderberries Blackberries Clover Tamarind Cocoa Black Eyed Peas Vanilla Cranberries Tomatoes Grapes
Ok, I have a pet peeve here and I’m gonna vent it for a minute, so bear with me.
I love honeybees. Love ‘em. I’d keep them, but my neighbor has three hives, so I basically just try to make my garden as hospitable as possible.
However.
European Honeybees are not the only pollinators on the planet, nor even the only bees.
Some of the plants on that list are native to the Americas. Somehow they grew just awesome and fed a whole bunch of peoples with, y’know, civilizations and everything! before the European honeybee showed up.
(In the 1600s. Shakespeare had been dead like five years when the bees showed up. Not before.)
Potatoes? The Inca had 3000+ varieties. They did not, until after the Spanish showed up, have European honeybees.
Tomatoes? I don’t doubt many modern cultivars are indeed pollinated by honeybees, but at the risk of anecdata, I have native bees all up in mine. And they grew somehow. Chili peppers too. All those centuries, and nary a honeybee in sight.
Prickly Pear? Article, did you, with a straight face, just tell me that goddamn prickly pear is honeybee pollinated? For the love of the Incan potato goddess, NO. LONG-TONGUED NATIVE BEES. And that’s just my local variety—they got some in the desert pollinated by BIRDS.
Look, colony collapse sucks. I will sign any petition you like to get the damn pesticides banned—I think they’re monstrous. There’s a No Monsanto sign on my garden fence.
But get your damn facts straight. The situation is bad enough with dressing it up in more panic. Humans lived for thousands of years in a European honeybee-free continent. Those were real people eating real meals made of real food, pollinated by real native pollinators.
There are more bees in heaven and earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your apiology.
I agree it’s important to acknowledge and support native bees in the Americas, and recognize other pollinators besides honey bees (I’m raising some mason bees now in my yard to supplement the work our wild honey bee hive does). But, you’re still missing an important complication.
Though we love European honey bees, they’re an invasive species. There’s debate about how much they affect native bees, but studies have shown that native bees aren’t as successful when they’re competing with European honey bees. This could mean that the populations and coverage of native bees is much reduced from pre colonial times. So if honey bees go extinct, native bees may not be ready to take over the work for them.
And, while honey bees have become the poster children of bee decline, they’re not the only species at risk. In China, some orchards have to be hand pollinated, because bees and other insect pollinators have been killed off by insecticides.
And, yes, there are birds and bats that pollinate some plants, but they are also in danger. Their populations have been severely reduced by humans. If you take all this and add to it the fact that there are a lot more crops being grown in the Americas, and lot more people to feed, then it is not unreasonable to be pretty panicky about the potential extinction of honey bees.
If we don’t address the honey bee problem, then we won’t be doing anything to help other bees and pollinating insects. I’m totally OK with the majority of people out there not understanding that the issue is bigger than just honey bees, if it means they’ll do something about it. If people are boycotting Monsato products, signing petitions, contacting their representatives, or whatever else to help honey bees, with no understanding that there are native pollinators out there, then I’m not going to complain.
6:33am
May 13, 2014
“Strange tradition from the forgotten rural years.” Bees attend keeper’s funeral, 1956.
always reblog bees
important bee news
4:27am
March 23, 2014
Who’s a pretty boy? You are, yes you are!
Bee covered in pollen resting in the heart of a crocus flower.
Nature-loving photographer, Boris Godfroid, uses macro photography for close-up shots, posted to his website boris.godfroidbrothers.be
Happy 1st Day of Spring!
Plant some flowers for the bees.
4:14am
March 14, 2014
Honey Bee and Honey Drop Necklace
Crafted with a vintage, faceted, pear-shaped amber glass jewel and an antique brass bee charm. This necklace is hung on a bronze cable chain. Don’t worry, the bee won’t sting you. Sold on Etsy.
5:24am
January 10, 2014
Bees from France got into some waste from an M&M’s factory and produced blue honey.
12:58am
January 2, 2014
➸ Bayer is suing a whole continent for saving the bees?
And it says a ban on its bee-killing pesticides is “disproportionate”?!?Followers, friends of followers, friends of THOSE friends, sign this now!
If the bees aren’t saved, our lives..ALL of our lives, for that matter, are going to take a huge turn for the worse.
Please, sign this petition. I’m begging you, followers. It only needs 400k signatures. It’s so, so close to being completed.
Please, sign it. We have to save the bees.