Central Beekeepers Alliance

The Perfect Design of Honey Bees

As beekeepers know, bees are "just this magnificent little engineered thing, just perfect for all the things they can do." As shown in the award-winning documentary, Silence of the Bees, honeybees are a wonder of design. The anatomy of the honey bee is perfectly suited to its many functions in Nature.

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Glass is Half Empty to Shaken Honey Bees

When people are depressed, they tend to see the glass as half empty, not half full -- but who would expect the same of honeybees? New research shows humans and bees may be more alike than you might think!

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Bees trained to give early warning of plant disease

Remember, back in school, hearing about Pavlov’s dog that learned to drool when it heard a bell ring? That method of “classical conditioning” is how Dr. Andrew Sutherland, a researcher with the University of California Davis Plant Pathology Department, is training honey bees to detect plant disease in agricultural crops. Here’s the story, straight from [...]

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Are Honey Bees Hooked on Caffeine and Nicotine?

Have you noticed your honeybees buzzing around the coffee grounds in your compost pile on a warm day in early spring? it turns out, there may be a reason for this common behaviour — the bees might be seeking a hit of caffeine! Researchers at the University of Haifa-Oranim have learned that bees are attracted [...]

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The Secret of Hive Temperature Control: Heater Bees

Bee researchers have learned special "heater bees" act like a "living radiator" to carefully control the brood temperatures to determine what role the mature bees will fill in the colony -- and those empty cells aren't a problem but a necessary part of how the heater bees function.

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