The Daily Green offers Five Ways to Bolster the Bees and Five Ways Kids Can “Save Our Bees” to help make the world a better, safer, healthier place for all our essential pollinators.

Suggestions are varied — from planting more bee-friendly forage plants in our garden, to cutting back on the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Garden mulch — which seems so harmless at first glance — can discourage the native bees who need to burrow into the soil to make their homes, something that many of us wouldn’t have considered.

For more news and information about how to help bees (including a regular column by Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine), visit TheDailyGreen.com.

You may already be familiar with the fact that bees can be trained to find explosives, drugs, and military chemicals?

Now one British student, Susana Soares, is looking into how bees’ exceptional sniffing abilities might help humans in other ways. The possibilities might include training bees to detect a pregnancy or diagnose a disease condition, simply through the scent of a person’s breath.

Bees have a phenomenal odour perception. They can be trained within minutes using Pavlov’s reflex to target a specific odour and their range of detection includes pheromones, toxins and disease diagnosis.

Soares is a second year student at the Royal College of Art, ” the world’s only wholly postgraduate university institution of art and design – fine art, applied art, design, communications and humanities.” Her interest is in the benefits to be derived from integrating human science and design with elements of the natural world.

See also:
Active Monitoring, Conditioning of Bees to Find Chemicals and Devices

Tuesday, 10 July 2007
Central Beekeepers Alliance Meeting
Agricultural Research Centre, Fredericton, NB
7:30 p.m.

Want to learn more about Beekeeping? Visitors and new beekeepers are always welcome! Most meetings include an educational session, group discussion, or hands-on demonstration for the benefit of beginning beekeepers in central New Brunswick. The Agricultural Research Centre (”Experimental Farm”) is on the Lincoln Road, Fredericton. Entry is around the back of the building.

University of North Carolina biology student Andrew Pierce has just discovered something previously unknown about the behaviour of the European honeybee — “perhaps the most studied and economically important insect on Earth.”

It seems that the queen bee is not, after all, the absolute ruler of the hive.

“Major colony activities are initiated by the cumulative group actions of the colony’s older workers, not by the queen’s individual decision,” Pierce’s research shows. It is the older workers that signal to the queen and to the rest of the colony that it’s time to swarm. Inside the swarm cluster itself, workers make the “piping” noise that we normally associate with queens in competition with each other, telling the queen to fly.

“Researchers have never reported worker piping being done on the queen before, so some of what we found was exciting,” Pierce said. “It was generally surprising to see the level of interaction that the older bees have with the queen. This doesn’t normally happen in the hive.”

But this doesn’t mean that there’s a group of experienced bees who control the actions of the hive. Because bees have such short life spans and tiny brains, they aren’t capable of “managing the colony the way a human village might be managed by a council of elders.” Instead, it appears that the dynamics of the group itself — complex social interactions, environmental pressures or group dynamics — are “in some still-unknown way” the driving force behind all the complex group activities that honeybees undertake.

See also:
UNC Charlotte Undergraduate Publishes Significant Finding on Honeybee Societies: Older worker bees– not queen – inititate action, make decisions 11 June 2007

The Institute of Science in Society, London, has released a report of research that suggests a combination of factors may be responsible for Colony Collapse Disorder.

According to Dr. Joe Cummins, author of the repost, there is evidence to suggest that sub-lethal amounts of certaian common systemic insecticides, such as Bt, could be making honeybees more susceptible to parasitic fungi such as Nosema. While the pesticides or fungi in themselves might not be enough to seriously harm a colony, the two factors may “interact synergistically” to play a role in killing honeybees.

I am not suggesting that biocontrol agents pose a threat to the honeybee, rather, the exposure to sub-lethal levels of systemic insecticides used in seed treatment of both conventional and GM crops and in widespread soil and foliar applications can affect beneficial insects by reducing their immunity to parasitic fungi. Furthermore, bees that otherwise are unaffected by exposure to Bt toxins in GM crops may succumb much more readily when they are infected with parasitic fungi…

In the ISIS press release, Parasitic Fungi and Pesticides Act Synergistically to Kill Honeybees?, Dr. Cummins calls for changes to the testing methods for pesticides, to look more closely at the effect of these products on honeybees in combination with parasitic fungi.

Regulators have allowed extensive deployment of systemic insecticides for seed treatment and they have allowed extensive use of foliar sprays of the systemic insecticides on a wide array of food and feed crops. The impact of such pesticides on honeybees has been evaluated using measurements of lethal dose of the pesticides alone, ignoring the clear evidence that sub-lethal doses of the insecticides act synergistically with fungal parasites of the insects. The honeybees may be falling victim to “friendly fire” directed to exterminating insect pests.