Salon.com > Honeybees

Bees to EPA: Where’s your sting?

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 20:00:00 +0000

The list of fruits, vegetables and field crops that rely on honeybees for pollination is truly astonishing: apples, avocados, carrots, cotton seed, peaches, pumpkins, strawberries, sunflowers … it goes on and on. There’s stuff on the list that I’m not fond of, like onions, and things I couldn’t live without, like peanuts (well, peanut butter, anyway). The same is surely true for you. So it should frighten us all to learn how badly honeybees fared last year, as a mysterious malady kept right on killing them.

Without honeybees, we may cease to be

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:11:00 +0000

If you like almonds, then 2013 brought some bad news. Each year, honeybees from across the country make the trek to California, which grows 80 percent of the world’s almonds, to pollinate the almond crop. But bees have been dying in unusually large numbers for several years now, and this year appears worse than most.

The problems we face if we don’t have healthy populations of pollinators, particularly honeybees, extend beyond almonds. Three fourths of the top crops grown in the world require animals – mostly insects – for pollination. Odds are that most of your favorite fruits, nuts and melons are pollinated by honeybees.

Across the pond, the European Union has made major strides in shedding light on the role of certain pesticides in honeybee deaths. In fact, the European Commission has proposed a two-year ban on these pesticides. Meanwhile, at home, beekeepers remain frustrated that the U.S. government is not as forward-thinking. And, for another year, the saga of bee deaths continues.

Bees in desperate need of ZZZs

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 15:32:00 +0000

We're all familiar with the feeling—waking up from a restless night only to realize that this will be a very long, sleepy day. Recent research reveals that honeybees are also sensitive to sleep deprivation, and although a cup of coffee may give you a morning buzz, the bees aren't so lucky.

Neurobiologists at the Free University of Berlin have found that sleepy bees fail to remember lessons learned the day before, a finding that could help scientists discover the neural processes involved in sleep and memory formation. They present their research October 25 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

"We started with the idea that we could look for a neural substrate of learning and memory in bees, since they have a wonderful memory, can be easily trained, and we know their brain well at the neuronal level," says study co-author Randolf Menzel.