• Associated Press

Beekeepers from Best Bees inspect two hives on the roof of the Warren Rudman U.S. Court House

CONCORD, N.H. — While judges, lawyers and support staff at the federal courthouse in Concord, New Hampshire, keep the American justice system buzzing, thousands of humble honeybees on the building’s roof are playing their part in a more important task — feeding the world.

The Warren Rudman U.S. Court House, in Concord, N.H. The roof of the building hosts two bee hives, a part of a national effort to increase the population of pollinators.

The Warren B. Rudman courthouse is one of several federal facilities around the country participating in the General Services Administration’s Pollinator Initiative, a government program aimed at assessing and promoting the health of bees and other pollinators, which are critical to life on Earth.

“Anybody who eats food, needs bees,” said Noah Wilson-Rich, co-founder, CEO and chief scientific officer of the Boston-based Best Bees company, which contracts with the government to take care of the honeybee hives at the New Hampshire courthouse and at some other federal buildings.

Bees help pollinate the fruits and vegetables that sustain humans, he said. They pollinate hay and alfalfa, which feed cattle that provide the meat we eat. And they promote the health of plants that, through photosynthesis, give us clean air to breathe.

Yet the busy insects that contribute an estimated $25 billion to the U.S. economy annually are under threat from diseases, agricultural chemicals and habitat loss that kill about half of all honeybee hives annually. Without human intervention, including beekeepers creating new hives, the world could experience a bee extinction that would lead to global hunger and economic collapse, Wilson-Rich said.

The pollinator program is part of the federal government’s commitment to promoting sustainability, which includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting climate resilient infrastructure, said David Johnson, the General Services Administration’s sustainability program manager for New England.

The GSA’s program started last year with hives at 11 sites.

Some of those sites are no longer in the program. Hives placed at the National Archives building in Waltham, Massachusetts, last year did not survive the winter.

Since then, other sites were added. Two hives, each home to thousands of bees, were placed on the roof of the Rudman building in March.

The program is collecting data to find out whether the honeybees, which can fly 3 to 5 miles from the roof in their quest for pollen, can help the health of not just the plants on the roof, but also of the flora in the entire area, Johnson said.

“Honeybees are actually very opportunistic,” he said. “They will feed on a lot of different types of plants.”

The program can help identify the plants and landscapes beneficial to pollinators and help the government make more informed decisions about what trees and flowers to plant on building grounds.

Best Bees tests the plant DNA in the honey to get an idea of the plant diversity and health in the area, Wilson-Rich said, and they have found that bees that forage on a more diverse diet seem to have better survival and productivity outcomes.

Other federal facilities with hives include the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services headquarters in Baltimore; the federal courthouse in Hammond, Indiana; the Federal Archives Records Center in Chicago; and the Denver Federal Center.

The federal government isn’t alone in its efforts to save the bees. The hives placed at federal sites are part of a wider network of about 1,000 hives at home gardens, businesses and institutions nationwide that combined can help determine what’s helping the bees, what’s hurting them and why.

The GSA’s Pollinator Initiative is also looking to identify ways to keep the bee population healthy and vibrant and model those lessons at other properties — both government and private sector — said Amber Levofsky, the senior program advisor for the GSA’s Center for Urban Development.

“The goal of this initiative was really aimed at gathering location-based data at facilities to help update directives and policies to help facilities managers to really target pollinator protection and habitat management regionally,” she said.

And there is one other benefit to the government honeybee program that’s already come to fruition: the excess honey that’s produced is donated to area food banks.

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: Honeybee Health Blooming at Federal Facilities Across US (voanews.com)

by BioMed Central

Managed honey bees. Credit: Bianca Ackermann, public domain

Urban honey bees could be used to gain insight into the microbiome of the cities in which they forage, which can potentially provide information on both hive and human health, reports a study published in Environmental Microbiome.

Cities are built for human habitation, but are also spaces that host a wide range of living species, and understanding this diverse landscape is important for urban planning and human health. However, sampling the microbial landscape in a manner to cover wide areas of a city can be labor-intensive.

Elizabeth Hénaff and colleagues investigated the potential of honey bees (Apis mellifera) to help gather samples of microorganisms across cities, as honey bees are known to forage daily up to one mile from their hives in urban environments. They sampled various materials from three hives in New York as part of a pilot study, and found diverse genetic information, including from environmental bacteria, in the debris accumulated at the bottom of the hives. Subsequent samples of hive debris in Sydney and Melbourne (Australia), Venice (Italy), and Tokyo (Japan) suggest that each location has a unique genetic signature as seen by honey bees.

In Venice, the genetic data was dominated by fungi related to wood rot and date palm DNA. In Melbourne, the sample was dominated by eucalyptus DNA, while the sample from Sydney showed little plant DNA but contained genetic data from a bacteria species that degrades rubber (Gordonia polyisoprenivorans). Tokyo samples included plant DNA from Lotus and wild soybean, as well as the soy sauce fermenting yeast Zygosaccharomyces rouxii. Additionally, the authors compiled genetic material from the hive debris for Rickettsia felis (“cat scratch fever”), a pathogen that is spread to humans via cat scratches. These findings indicate the potential of this as a surveillance method but are currently too preliminary to suggest that this is an effective method of monitoring human diseases.

The hive debris also contained bee-related microorganisms, likely coming from honey bee parts present in the debris. Based on 33 samples from the hives across the subsequent four cities, the authors found known bee microorganisms, whose presence indicate a healthy hive, and in some hives bee pathogens were detected, such as Paenibacillus larvae , Melissococcus plutonius, or the parasite Varroa destructor. The authors suggest these findings indicate that debris may additionally be used to assess the overall health of the hives.

The authors conclude that honey bee hive debris collected by honey bees provides a snapshot of the microbial landscape of urban environments and could be used alongside other measures to assess the microbial diversity and health of cities and honey bees in turn.

More information: Elizabeth Hénaff, Holobiont Urbanism: sampling urban beehives reveals cities’ metagenomes, Environmental Microbiome (2023). DOI: 10.1186/s40793-023-00467-z. www.biomedcentral.com/articles … 6/s40793-023-00467-z

Provided by BioMed Central

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: https://www.labmanager.com/ebooks/assays-reagents-and-antibodies-29356

WRITTEN BY DAVID ANDREWS

| PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID ANDREWS

Volunteers harvest honey at Congressional Cemetery from bees on the cemetery grounds. Photographs and video by David Andrews.

You’ll soon be able to buy honey at, of all places, DC’s Congressional Cemetery—honey that was harvested from apiaries nestled into the hillside among the headstones and above the crypts on the cemetery grounds.

Jan Day is the president of the DC Beekeepers Alliance. She’s been keeping bees in DC for nine years—including apiaries of her own on her second-story balcony in Capitol Hill, appropriately yielding the name of her blog “Second Story Honey.” The alliance has had bees at Congressional for 12 years.

Jan Day, president of the DC Beekeepers Alliance at Congressional Cemetery.

Although it may seem spooky, Day says the cemetery is actually a great place to host bees. “One, it is filled with mature trees, and mature trees bloom and they actually offer a great forage source of nectar and pollen for our bees,” Day says. “Secondly, the cemetery is right along the banks of the Anacostia River, where there’s a variety of plants that are blooming from very early in the spring, even starting in February, through the frost in October, November.”

The hives are stacked behind a fence–away from visitors, which include dogs and dog walkers–and above the crypts built into the hillside, allowing the bees to buzz freely, high above human interference.

Beehives on the grounds of Congressional Cemetery.

Day says the average healthy hive in DC will produce between 30 and 50 pounds of excess honey per year that the beekeeper can take, but they make sure to leave between 60 and 80 pounds of honey on each hive so that bees have sufficient food for the winter.

“Lots of people want to know, ‘How can we help the bees? How can we save the bees?’ Probably the number one thing that you can do is plant pollinator friendly plants in your garden. That will help not just honeybees, but some of the 400 native bees, wasps, pollinators, and butterflies that frequent our gardens here in the city,” Day says.

Another way is to volunteer. The DC beekeepers alliance is made up of about 150 beekeepers across the city and nearby jurisdictions from all walks of life–volunteering as beekeepers for hobby. At Congressional, as many as ten beekeepers are on site at any given time, tending to the 25 hives, each hive containing about 60,000 bees at its peak.

“One of the ways we thank Congressional Cemetery for allowing us to keep bees here is by paying what we call our yard rent. And this is something that beekeepers around the world do. We pay our yard rent in the honey harvest experience that we’re going to have tonight and by donating the honey to the cemetery as their fundraiser.”

Visitors to the cemetery’s honey harvest last Tuesday got to tour the bee yards, try their hands at extracting honey from the hive, and learn how keepers bottle it into jars before sending it out into the community. Day says Beekeepers in DC generally harvest honey once a year, and the cemetery harvests in the fall, when it’s then sold as a fundraiser for the non-profit cemetery.

In total, 150 pounds of honey are bottled into jars for the public to buy.

Cemetery-grown honey, which Day claims is some of the best in the city, will go on sale starting in November, with a six-ounce jar costing $10. The cemetery will announce when sales open on its Facebook and Instagram pages.

“You’ve got to act fast,” Day says. “It goes like hotcakes.”

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/10/18/video-honey-soon-for-sale-at-congressional-cemetery/

Industry giants in Colorado host hives as way to support surrounding ecosystems

Free Range Beehives co-founder and head bee keeper John Rosol takes out a frame of bees from a beehive at Sterling Bay West on October 06, 2022. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)

By MEGAN ULU-LANI BOYANTON | mboyanton@denverpost.com | The Denver Post

IBM, Google and other corporations are dedicating budget lines to saving Colorado’s bee population, with hives at their in-state locations, in a business move that supports a critical part of the nation’s food-production system.

The number of honeybee hives in the U.S. has dwindled to around 2.5 million last year from 6 million in the 1940s, the Agriculture Department reported. As the state with the fifth-most bee diversity in the nation, Colorado is home to around 950 bee species, which put in work to pollinate both agricultural crops and native plants.

Without them, systems that humans rely on every day would suffer, including the food supply and ecosystems that provide clean air and stable soil. One solution: Supporting colonies wherever possible — from the average American’s backyard to a corporation’s rooftop.

Industry giants in Colorado have turned to Free Range Beehives, a corporate beekeeping company headquartered in Denver, to help guide their efforts. The business provides on-site beekeeping services to clients large and small, including real estate developer Sterling Bay, manufacturer Gates Corp., Colorado Public Radio, UMB Bank and the University of Denver.

“Our beehive investment in Colorado is part of IBM’s overall commitment to environmental sustainability,” said spokesperson Carrie Bendzsa. “Pollinators play an important role in maintaining a diverse ecosystem and small efforts like these can have a truly meaning impact on pollinator well-being.”

IBM’s formal commitment to environmental sustainability dates back more than 50 years ago with a corporate environmental policy, Bendzsa added in a statement. She highlighted conservation and biodiversity as corporate values.

Google’s partnership with Free Range Beehives to install beehive boxes helps the corporation both support local businesses and protect the natural ecosystem, a spokesperson said.

They aren’t the only ones paying attention to pollinators on local and national scales. Giant Eagle, Walmart and Whole Foods ranked as the top three U.S. grocery stores taking steps to address pesticide use, which can present risks to both bees and people, according to Friends of the Earth’s Bee-Friendly Retailer Scorecard.

On top of pesticides, threats to bees also include climate change and an invasive mite, said John Rosol, co-founder of Free Range Beehives.

“We do still need to save the bees,” he said. “In Colorado alone, managed hives lose 42% of their colonies every single year, and that’s not a sustainable number.”

His company works with around 15 clients, taking care of almost 70 hives in the field. Around July and August when the hives reach their peaks, they each host between 50,000-60,000 bees.

“We put the bees at the site,” Rosol said. “We maintain them, we own them and the client gets to keep them as long as they want.”

Rosol described beekeeping as a “locality-dependent profession,” with climates and seasons affecting the insects in different ways. For instance, the Centennial State differs from California or Texas because of its harsher, longer winters and shorter growing seasons.

Colorado also has altitude, unpredictable weather, dry air and high-plains desert climate.

The state has a strong beekeeping community, with the Colorado Department of Agriculture highlighting “a large number of hobby beekeepers,” or those with less than 150 hives. Rocky Mountain Bee Supply at 24 S. Walnut St. in Colorado Springs supplies beekeepers with bees, hives, supplies and more, while To Bee or Not To Bee at 8280 West Coal Mine Avenue #16 in Littleton offers beekeeping classes and supplies.

Free Range Beehives was founded in 2020 by two father-son pairs. Not only does the team install and regularly inspect the beehives, but it also offers educational presentations, hive tours and honey extraction from the colonies for their clients’ employees to take home.

“Companies are using this as an effort to demonstrate to their employees and to the communities and to the state that they do business in that they’re good stewards of the environment,” said Free Range Beehives’ co-founder Dave Mathias.

The bees also provide “good marketing and PR opportunities,” he added.

So far, Free Range Beehives has chosen to remain in Colorado, with a short-term aspiration of maintaining pollinator populations from southern Colorado up to Fort Collins. Mathias noted they’re “pretty close to achieving that.”

Into the future, “our goal is to get as large as we can, so that we can have maximum impact,” Mathias said, listing Arizona, Utah, Idaho and Missouri as potential options for regional expansion.

Ultimately, though, their mission comes back to the bees.

“When you consider that one out of three bites of food that the average person eats is pollinated by a bee, the importance to our food supply and to our very existence as humans in quite literally dependent upon the bees thriving,” Mathias said.

More discussion on Denverpost.com

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: Colorado’s industry giants make room for beekeeping, save the population (denverpost.com)

This is a picture of me visiting the University of Florida apiary where I spent a couple of weeks doing research. Only one of the great bee experiences my scientific career has given me.

Bee Culture is doing something a bit different this October. We have been publishing a long running series in our magazine by author James Masucci titled Bee Driven Mid-Life Crisis. It follows his journey from backyard, hobby beekeeper through all the trials and tribulations of turning that hobby into a business. He hits on topics such as  location (for stuff, for hives, for storage, for honey production, etc.), equipment, the building process, the finances and what he learned along the way, to name a few.

Since his journey is so spread out across so many issues (the articles started all the way back in January 2021!), we decided to highlight his series on our website! Look for a new part every Wednesday and Friday of October. And guess what! Parts 1 and 2 are already out!

We wanted to wait to highlight this journey until he was done with this initial stage of transitioning from hobby to commercial beekeeping. Since he is living the journey we’re sure he will have more insights, lessons and mistakes to avoid down the line but for now, he has settled into this new business and his initial stage of the journey is wrapped up. We hope you find this information helpful (even if you have no plans to create a large-scale business from your bees) and if not helpful, entertaining!

Click here to go directly to Part 1.

Bees at the entrance to a hive in Ashton, Md. (Photo by Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

Honeybee colonies have been dying more frequently in recent years than they used to, in large part because of a phenomenon commonly known as colony collapse disorder. Parasites and the stresses caused by commercial beekeeping practices have contributed to the problem, according to Thomas D. Seeley, a retired Cornell University professor who studies the behavior and social life of honeybees.

“It used to be a beekeeper would expect to lose 10 to 20 percent of colonies in a year, mostly over the winter,” he says. “And now the colony mortality can be 80 percent.”

Bees have been around for about 120 million years, though, says Brenda Kiessling, a retired physician and an Eastern Apicultural Society of North America-certified master beekeeper living in Vienna, Va. They have proven themselves capable of adjusting to changing conditions. “They have survived on their own and they have had to adapt,” says Kiessling, who has been caring for honeybees since the early 1970s. “They’ve lived through ice ages, rainstorms. Somehow they have survived.”

That knowledge has led Seeley, along with Kiessling and other researchers and amateur beekeepers, to embrace Darwinian beekeeping over the past decade. Once a niche practice, it is becoming more popular with hobbyists. It focuses on creating optimal conditions for bees to make honey, while also mimicking how Apis mellifera lives in the wild. That means housing colonies in small hives that replicate the size of a natural nest cavity, spacing hives far apart to prevent the spread of parasites from one colony to another, and positioning them far from areas treated with insecticides.

Kiessling has been following these guidelines with the bees she keeps at Sandy Spring Gardens in Ashton, Md., for the past three years. But first, she spent nearly a decade reading and researching, including by listening to several of Seeley’s lectures on the practice.

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: Could ‘Darwinian beekeeping’ help save honeybee colonies? – The Washington Post

BY STEVE WALENTIK

Associate Professor Aimee Dunlap has been working with researchers from six institutions around the St. Louis region to study pollination in urban orchards. The three-year project is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. (Screenshot)

Aimee Dunlap, an associate professor of biology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, has been directing a project studying pollination in urban and suburban orchards with colleagues at six institutions across the St. Louis region since last fall.

STLMade, an initiative of Greater St. Louis Inc. spotlighting notable and innovative work being done in the region, featured the collaboration in a feature story and video headlined “Hive Mind” on its website last week. It was the first installment of a two-part series about the project.

The research dives into the role of bees in pollination with the goal of maximizing fruit production while supporting biodiversity, and it’s supported by a $633,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

“I think that sometimes, when we think of animal behavior and we think about nature, we think about nature that’s far off,” Dunlap told STLMade. “It’s in Glacier National Park. It’s whales in the ocean. But right in your backyard is so much drama of what’s going on, just among the insects. A lot of times when we’re in our yards or we’re at a picnic, we see bees around. Those bees have fascinating lives. And we have so many different kinds of bees that all have different natural histories, like how they handle the winter, how they find mates, how they’re finding food, how they’re nesting. There’s such diversity here – when you dig into that, it is absolutely fabulous.”

Dunlap specializes in urban ecology and bee behavior, and she is a master gardener who volunteers with the 13th Street Community Garden in her Old North St. Louis neighborhood.

“Urban orchards are growing, and in St. Louis, we’re up to over 50 of them thanks to Seed St. Louis and Dean Gunderson,” Dunlap said in the video, referring to Seed St. Louis’ director of education. “But one aspect of those urban orchards – because they tend to be so small – is that the fruit production is great some years and poor other years. We’re really looking at ways of making that better – how are we going to maximize this fruit production?”

They aren’t just focusing on the pollinators but also on the plants as they study the role pollination plays in supporting a thriving ecosystem.

“We have experts and people that are tending to each single step of the entire pollination process, all the way from the emergence of a flower bud to the moment that you pick that apple or that fruit from the tree,” said Gerardo Camilo, a professor of biology at Saint Louis University who has done extensive research on the communities of bee pollinators present in St. Louis.

In addition to Dunlap and Camilo, the team of researchers includes UMSL Associate Professor Nathan Muchhala; Ed Spevak, curator of invertebrates at the Saint Louis Zoo and director of the Saint Louis Zoo WildCare Institute Center for Native Pollinator Conservation; Nicole Miller-Struttmann, the Laurance L. Browning Jr. Endowed Associate Professor of Biology at Webster University; Kyra Krakos, the coordinator of sustainability & environmental stewardship and associate professor of biology at Maryville University; and Peter Hoch, curator emeritus at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: STLMade spotlights UMSL-led research on pollination in urban orchards – UMSL Daily | UMSL Daily

David Moin

ShopCore Properties is creating a lot of buzz.

The real estate company is installing beehives in 30 of its 50-plus shopping centers around the country, in recognition of Earth Day and furthering its sustainability initiatives. Beekeepers are being hired.

Last year, the privately held ShopCore piloted an urban beekeeping program installed at two properties in 2021.

“Sustainability is central to our mission, our mandate and our purpose,” Corinne Rico, director of sustainability for ShopCore Properties, said in a statement Monday. “From our properties to our communities, prioritizing the environment is part of how we do business. Installing beehives is one more layer to our sustainability and environmental goals. Bees play an exceedingly important role in a thriving ecosystem and the honey they produce is rich in antioxidants. So bees are advantageous for not only the environment but also your health.”

ShopCore will install the beehives during 2022 and will harvest the honey in the fall. The honey will then be packaged and offered to communities as gifts. Each beehive will have about 50,000 bees and will be cared for by local beekeepers, the company indicated. ShopCore has partnered with Alvéole, an urban beekeeping company.

A majority of the beehives will be located on the top of the building’s roofs, with a few on green spaces on the property, including in the back of parking lots.

Rico said each ShopCore property will have its own set of solutions to advance sustainability and that overall, the company looks to partner with tenants to achieve sustainability goals.

ShopCore said its sustainability solutions include benchmarking and tracking energy consumption; green leasing practices; reducing energy, water, and waste; installing renewable energy systems; incorporating sustainability into all business decisions, and installing electric vehicle charging stations across its parking areas.

ShopCore, an affiliate of The Blackstone Group, manages 50-plus community, power and grocery-anchored centers, almost all in open-air formats, covering about 20 million square feet across 19 states. Retail tenants include Walmart, Target, Whole Foods, Ross Stores and Home Goods, among others. Key properties include One Colorado in Pasadena, Calif.; Downtown Palm Beach Gardens in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., and The Shops At SkyView Center, an enclosed center in Flushing, N.Y.

An Alternative Use for Shopping Centers: Beehives (yahoo.com)

Jeff Smithpeters

BEE GUY — Jon Zawislak, extension apiary specialist, talks to visitors about pollinators at the Arkansas Flower and Garden Show, Feb. 28-March 1, 2020, at the Arkansas State Fair Grounds. (U of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture photo by Mary Hightower)

By Tracy Courage
U of A System Division of Agriculture

• Extension course teaches beekeeping basics
• Course offered in-person, 6-9 p.m. April 11, 18, and 25 at state extension office

LITTLE ROCK – Beekeeping basics, one of the Cooperative Extension Service’s most requested courses, is being offered in-person this spring. The three-part course teaches beginning beekeepers everything they need to know to get started with honey bees.

Classes will be held in-person on April 11, 18 and 25 from 6-9 p.m. at the Cooperative Extension Service state office, 2301 S. University Ave., Little Rock.

“There’s no experience necessary,” Jon Zawislak, assistant professor of apiculture and urban entomology with University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, said. “This is a perfect course if you have zero experience or if you’re a first-year beekeeper.”

Honey harvested from the hives can be a source of income for beekeepers, and the bees help increase crop yields through pollination. More than 100 crops are pollinated by honey bees, including fruits and vegetables, and forage for dairy and beef cattle.

Zawislak has been teaching the beekeeping short course since 2009 and regularly gets requests from beginning hobbyists. In the course, participants will learn about the structure and function of the beehive, essential tools for beekeeping and learn basic honeybee biology and behaviors. Zawislak also covers colony inspection and pest management.

“We will also cover all the seasonal tasks – harvesting honey, preparing hives for winter, and keeping colonies healthy,” he added.

The cost is $30, and seating is limited. To register, contact the Pulaski County Extension Office at 501-340-6650. For more information about honey bees, visit uaex.uada.edu/bees.

To learn about extension programs in Arkansas, contact your local Cooperative Extension Service agent or visit www.uaex.uada.edu. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @AR_Extension. To learn more about Division of Agriculture research, visit the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station website: https://aaes.uark.edu. Follow on Twitter at @ArkAgResearch. To learn more about the Division of Agriculture, visit https://uada.edu/. Follow us on Twitter at @AgInArk.

About the Division of Agriculture

The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture’s mission is to strengthen agriculture, communities, and families by connecting trusted research to the adoption of best practices. Through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cooperative Extension Service, the Division of Agriculture conducts research and extension work within the nation’s historic land grant education system.

Extension offers course in beekeeping basics – SWARK Today

By Scott Solomon, Rice University

The sun temple built by pharaoh Nyuserre in the Fifth Dynasty of ancient Egypt 4,500 years ago has the earliest known depiction of beekeeping. But remnants of beeswax in pottery fragments from 9,000 years ago in Turkey suggest that beekeeping has an even longer history going back to the very start of agriculture.

Beekeeping is a huge industry, thanks to the role that honeybees play not only as crop pollinators but also in their production of honey and other products, like beeswax. (Image: Olha Solodenko/Shutterstock)

History of Beekeeping

It’s not hard to imagine why ancient people would want to keep bees around. Honey was one of the only available sweeteners in the ancient Near East. Beeswax also had medicinal and practical uses, for example as parts of tools and as a waterproofing agent.

Also, as modern beekeepers know, bees are relatively easy to work with. Unlike many other stinging insects, the European honeybee, Apis mellifera, is relatively reluctant to sting. That’s especially true when a bee fills up with honey, which honeybees do instinctively when they smell smoke.

While some have argued that this behavior comes from the bees’ natural inclination to abandon their hives at the first sign of a wildfire, Cornell University bee biologist Tom Seeley believes it may be exactly the opposite—honeybees may engorge themselves with honey so that they can survive inside the hive for a long period of time after a wildfire, which could easily burn all of the flowering plants that they depend on for nectar.

Whatever the reason, beekeepers have always taken advantage of the fact that honeybees become docile at the smell of smoke.

This article comes directly from content in the video series Why Insects Matter: Earth’s Most Essential Species. Watch it now, on Wondrium.

Bees Have Expandable Sacks

The anatomical feature that allows honeybees to fill up on honey is the crop. The crop is the frontmost section of an insect’s gut that, in honeybees and some other insects, functions like an expandable sack. The crop is located in the abdomen and is surrounded by muscles that relax to allow it to fill with honey but can also contract if the bee wants to share honey with another member of its hive.

Bees also use their crop to fill up with nectar when visiting flowers, which they later regurgitate inside the hive and fan with their wings to reduce the water content through evaporation, turning it into honey.

So the crop is fundamental to the lifestyle of the honeybee and, by extension, to the role that honeybees have played throughout human history.

How Bee Eyes Work

Bees are very good at locating flowers thanks to their acute visual abilities. Let’s take a closer look at one of the individual ommatidia that make up the compound eye of a honeybee.

An individual ommatidium is an elongated structure that tapers toward the base. At the top is the lens, which is made of two separate components. The outermost portion is the cornea, a clear, hexagonal structure. Below that is a crystalline cone, shaped like an upside-down pyramid.

Together, the cornea and cone focus light into the inner portion of the ommatidium called the rhabdom, which is lined by photoreceptor cells. Each of the photoreceptor cells inside an ommatidium is capable of responding at a particular wavelength of light.

A bee’s vision is also trichromatic like human vision, but the three colors that bees can see are different. Honeybees have photoreceptor cells attuned to green and blue as we do, but instead of red (which is a lower wavelength), bees have a third kind of photoreceptor cell that detects ultraviolet.

So compared to human vision, which can detect light of wavelengths between about 380 and 740 nanometers, honeybees can see wavelengths between 300 and 650 nanometers. So compared to us, a honeybee’s vision is effectively shifted towards shorter wavelengths of light.

Advantages of Bee Vision

To see how bees view flowers, we have to view them under ultraviolet light. (Image: Immephotography/Shutterstock)

Because bees are important pollinators for many plant species, the flowers of many bee-pollinated plants evolved to have colors that bees can easily see. This is the reason why so many bee-pollinated flowers are purple, violet, or blue. Some plants also have flowers with ultraviolet colors, which bees can see but are invisible to our eyes.

To read the complete article go to;

Why Beekeeping Is an Efficient Industry (thegreatcoursesdaily.com)

Links
Website: https://mostatebeekeepers.org/
Email: ProgramChair@mostatebeekeepers.org

‘There’s a little more to (beekeeping) than just throwing them in your backyard… and collecting honey from them for toast,’ says Mike Barks
Nikki Cole

“I was the kind of kid that was glued to the Discovery Channel. I was always interested in nature, birds, insects… that’s what always piqued my interest,” he says. “The bees were just always something that stuck out to me.

“I got into it with my dad, who’d met an old beekeeper here in Barrie and he showed us a few things. We eventually bought a couple of bee hives off of him and it just kind of grew from there.”

Since opening the doors of Barks Apiaries, located at 1503 Snow Valley Rd., business has been booming.

“Beekeeping seemed to really take off over the pandemic. People were stuck at home and looking for something to do, so a lot of people took up beekeeping,” Barks says. “When people think about beekeeping, they obviously think about honey, but there’s also candles, beeswax… creams, lotions, other skin care products.

“If you get into the commercial side of things… pollination is a pretty big thing right now. It’s always been a big industry, but even more so the last couple of years because we’ve had shortages of available bee hives,” he adds. “Big commercial companies (orchards) are looking for beekeepers to provide bees to pollinate the crops so they can actually produce a crop.”

For the typical hobbyist, however, beekeeping can also be relaxing.

“You purchase a couple of beehives and it’s much like having a pet… so there is a fair bit of work, which some people don’t realize until they get into it,” Barks says. “There’s a little more to it than just throwing them in your backyard… and collecting honey from them for toast.”

Barks suggests anyone interested in taking up beekeeping to first “do their research,” noting there can be a lot involved — in both cost and time.

To read the complete article go to;

Beekeeping business buzzing with activity during pandemic (6 photos) – Barrie News (barrietoday.com)

Everyone got so into the idea of urban beekeeping that now there might be too many urban bees

What happens when every company decides that the sustainable thing is to put a beehive on the MORE LIKE THIS

BY ADELE PETERS

Urban beekeeping is big business: Alvéole, one company based in Montreal, manages thousands of beehives on the rooftops of more than 600 office buildings in North America, at corporations that host bees (and offer free honey) as an employee perk. You can pay other companies to take care of a beehive in your backyard.

The number of hives in cities keeps growing. In Paris, for example, the number of registered hives has jumped up by a factor of eight over the last decade. It’s billed as good for nature. But a recent study that looked at the growth of beekeeping in Swiss cities finds that the number of bees is now unsustainable: When the bees fly out to find pollen, there aren’t enough urban flowers to support them. And the honeybees may be putting pressure on other pollinators.

In Switzerland, the researchers saw the same trend that’s happening elsewhere, with strong growth in beekeeping in almost every city between 2012 and 2018 (in the Swiss city of Lugano, which they studied, the number of hives grew 2,387%). Then they looked at the green space available around clusters of hives. In each city, there weren’t enough “floral resources” for the huge number of new bees.

The study doesn’t analyze how the surplus of bees might be impacting other wildlife, but it does note that honeybees can negatively impact the number of wild pollinators in an area. In a place like the U.S., where European honeybees were imported for agriculture, they compete with wild bees and butterflies, which are already at risk for other reasons, from pesticide use to climate change.

Adding more green space and pollinator-friendly plants in cities would help. But the study suggests that cities also need to set limits on the proliferation of urban honeybees, with the number of hives allowed in any particular area limited by the amount of green space nearby and enough distance between hives. And companies that are adding bees to make their image greener—something that some critics have called “bee-washing”—might want to rethink their plans.

Everyone got so into the idea of urban beekeeping that now there might be too many urban bees (fastcompany.com)

Fr. Michael Rennier 

How beekeeping satisfies the soul

Keeping bees is both a meaningful and sacred hobby … and deeply connected to the liturgy.

This past year, our family became apiarists. We got hold of a few colonies of honeybees and set them up in two hives side by side in front of a field of clover.

The bees have the run of 20 acres of a little wild and wooded valley tucked a few miles north of the Missouri River. They’re free to roam where they will, gathering nectar from wild clover, grape vines, and dogwood.

We’re not particularly talented beekeepers. One of the colonies seems far more motivated than the other – each takes its personality from their queen – and we don’t quite know how to fix it, but so far they’ve survived and even rewarded us with some of their extra honey.

Bees play a vital, if unseen, role in making the world beautiful. They have a complicated relationship with flowers, which tempt them in with bright, colored displays and sweet nectar only to secretly send them along with pollen stuck to their legs. I don’t think the bees are complaining, though.

Neither should we. After all, bees are the hidden laborers who, by spreading that pollen around, fertilize the flowers and make plants capable of producing fruit. Without bees, we wouldn’t know what an apple tastes like. Fruit would barely exist at all.

For example, the Central Valley in California, an area the size of Delaware, produces 2.3 billion pound of almonds every year, but those enormous orchards wouldn’t manage to produce even a fraction of those almonds without the help of bees. Beekeepers actually drive their colonies in on flatbed trucks for the week to help out.

Today it’s a widespread hobby and something of a big business, but it wasn’t long ago that beekeeping was a more specialized pursuit of monks and priests. Priests have always been interested in beekeeping – which is why I wanted to take it up also – not because of the insatiable desire for honey but because bees also make wax.

The reason we use beeswax candles for sacred liturgy

Beeswax makes the cleanest burning, brightest candles, which don’t produce a smell and don’t create a lot of smoke that leaves the ceiling and walls dirty with soot. Beeswax also burns longer than, say tallow candles made of animal fat.

Today, even though candles still burn on church altars every day, they’re an afterthought because we have electric lights. It used to be the case that candles not only provided an element of beauty and a comforting atmosphere, they were also vital to actually illuminating interior spaces.

To this very day, candles that burn on Catholic altars are required to be contain beeswax as the main ingredient.

There’s an interesting reason for this: Priests have always been aware that beeswax is a pure substance. Only the worker bees produce wax, and worker bees don’t mate with the queen. All their lives, they remain celibate and virginal. This is why candles – think, for instance, of the Paschal Candle – are symbols of Christ. They provide sacred light, as they burn the wax is consumed in sacrifice, and they’re made of virgin material.

The mystical quality of bees

Bees, it turns out, are highly theological. Maybe this is why they prompt endless poetic odes. Emily Dickinson, for instance, writes constantly about them;

The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.

As I watch our industrious little bees buzzing around their hives, I’m constantly amazed at their perseverance, the way they take pollen, a yellowish dust that most of despise and think of as the cause of sneezing misery, and use it to blanket the fields with flowers. Whatever pollen sticks to them, they turn into beauty.

We should all be more like bees. Dispensers of beauty. Or more like candles. A light cutting through shadows. These metaphors cling to me and I cannot help but hear in them the voice of God.

Perseverance, self-sacrifice, beauty, purity – all are habitual virtues I desire to practice with ever-greater dedication, and in this way transform my days into a continuous act of love. Each of us is a seed-sower of flowers in the fields.

Online Beekeeping Courses & Webinars with Rutgers University

Make a beeline to Rutgers University for online beekeeping courses and webinars this spring and summer! From disease and mite prevention to honey production and harvesting, Bee-ginner Beekeeping will cover everything you need to know to further your hobby or get your business off the ground! Topics include:

• Bee Biology
• Queen Bee Purchasing
• Disease and Mite Prevention
• Hive Assembly and Management
• Honey Extraction
• Rules and Regulations
• And Much More!

Our instructors are Mike Haberland, an Associate Professor and County Environmental Agent with Rutgers Cooperative Extension, and Debbie Haberland, a teacher, marine biologist, and owner of Working Girls Meadows apiary. They will be on hand every step of the way to answer your questions and guide your learning. Complete the 15 – 17 hours of online course work at your own pace and attend a live review and Q&A session with our instructors. Certificates will be issued for successful completion of this course. Three-week sessions are available in March and May 2022.

Add on to your Bee-ginner course with topical, live webinars in April and June 2022!  Further your learning with the following offerings:

• Sustainable Beekeeping – Minimize losses through management, use local bee stocks (your own or a local beekeeper), and create resource hives
• The Ins and Outs of Treating Your Colony – Review recommendations for detecting and treating colonies for parasites and pathogens in a sustainable way
• Take Note of Your Hive: Recordkeeping for Beekeepers – Reduce bee losses, increase honey production, and raise better brood with recordkeeping best practices

Discounts are available when you register for any of our webinars alongside the beginner class!

To Register, go to;

http://www.cpe.rutgers.edu/programs/beekeeping.html