Central Beekeepers Alliance

August 2007

Beekeepers Events

Beekeepers at FREX 2007



The Central Beekeepers Alliance will have a booth at the FREX again this year, with an educational display, beekeepers to answer your questions, and our members’ own local honey for sale.

The 180th Fredericton Exhibition is 2 - 8 September, 2007.

Check the schedule of events and plan to drop by the Coliseum gangway to visit the beekeepers… if you can tear yourself away from the midway, the harness racing, and the high wire acts!

CBA members, if you’ve signed up to take a shift at our FREX booth and need to double-check your place on the schedule, just give Dan Richards a call at 455-4922. Thank you!

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How Bee Researchers Are Tackling CCD

James William of Discovery News goes straight to the USDA Bee Research Lab to find out what’s been going on with honeybees in North America.

Where this video goes beyond many of the other news stories that we’ve seen — as one might expect from the Discovery Channel — here, the emphasis is on the actual steps that the scientists and researchers are going through to try to track down the causes of Colony Collapse Disorder.

(Watch for the footage of bees being dissected to check for tracheal mites — something the average beekeeper doesn’t usually get to see when we send samples off for testing.)

Williams reports that the researchers he spoke to are optimistic about their work, thanks to the encoding of the honeybee genome that was accomplished last year, and the greater range of genetic study that this makes possible.

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Fear of Bees

When lightning struck down a very large basswood tree in Campbellsport, Wisconsin, last week, it displaced a small colony of honeybees that had made their home in the hollow trunk.

Public Works officials set up barricades with signs reading “Danger: Bees” and police kept people away from the site while a call went out to Dennis Haber, “The Bee Guy,” to come and deal with the insects…

It’s a fairly typical scenario, and one that we’ve all seen on our local news programs. And the appearance of honeybees outside their hive, too often, seems to be reported in highly dramatic terms — Swarm of bees stops traffic on Main Street!

The Swarm I can’t help thinking, it sounds like something out of a sci-fi horror “B movie”!

Consider the facts:

  • Less than 1 percent of the population has a systemic allergy to bee stings.
  • Bees will defend their queen and their hive, but a swarm has no hive to protect. By nature, unlike some other insects with stingers, honeybees are not aggressive without a good reason.
  • A honey bee can sting a person only once; the bee will die when she stings.

And yet, it’s not uncommon for otherwise capable adults to verge on near-hysteria when faced with a cluster of bees.

Fight or Flight!

burning beesIn Florida, for example, a few summers ago, a very small swarm of honeybees settled onto a backyard swing set in a suburban backyard.

The occupants of the home, rather than waiting for the bees to move on to another location, threw tennis balls at the swarm to try to dislodge it.

When that got “pretty boring,” they improvised an incinerator and burned out the bees with several quarts of gasoline, high-octane gasoline, and paint thinner.

More recently and closer to home, the Atlantic Lottery folks came out with a television commercial — it’s on the air now, in fact — showing a fully-suited beekeeper running in panic from his own bees!

It’s that grade-B horror film, all over again…

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Burkina-Faso Beekeeping update: past deadline

CUSO seeks beekeeper for Albert Schweitzer Ecological Centre in Burkina Faso
Update: Deadline for application for this opportunity has passed.

To see any similar opportunites that might be written up on our site, see the site map, try the search box below, or go to the Central Beekeepers Alliance home page to see our most recent articles.

 

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How Honeybee Colonies Choose a Nest When Swarming

From the National Geographic:

A single ant or bee isn’t smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots.

Specifically referenced is the work of Thomas Seeley, on a small island off the coast of Maine, on how the honeybee colony picks a new home when swarming. (This starts on page two, part way down, if you want to skip the ant-related stuff).

See
Swarm Behavior | Swarm Theory by Peter Miller
National Geographic, July 2007

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