Central Beekeepers Alliance

Honey Bees can Count, Scientists Say

Researchers in Australia have discovered that honeybees can count. They may be a long way from being able to count their own numbers of sisters in the hive, but it has been shown that bees can count up to four, at any rate. “We began by asking whether bees can learn to ‘count’ the number of landmarks that they encounter on the way to a food source,“ said Professor Mandyam Srinivasan of the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI), who led the research conducted with a colleague from Sweden, Marie Dacke.

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New Bee Breeding Research in Canada

A new Genome BC research project will soon put advanced genomics tools into the hands of bee breeders, enabling them select only the strongest, most resistant bees for breeding programs. New Research will Help Honeybee Breeders out of a Sticky Situation Prince George, BC — Canadians may have noticed that there were decidedly fewer bees [...]

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Honeybees Gone Wild

If you’ve ever wondered how honeybees might live, if we didn’t put them into hive boxes, here’s a look at a feral colony on their fresh white heart-shaped natural comb. See how the centre of the heart is darker, where the brood was laid? Look closely, and you can even see a few capped cells. [...]

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New Bee Book Review: The Buzz About Bees – Jürgen Tautz

When you’ve been into honey bees for a while, don’t all the bee books start to look the same? Well, The Buzz about Bees by Jürgen Tautz, translated into English just this summer by David Sandeman, is a honeybee book with a real difference. To begin with, it’s almost impossible to choose between the text [...]

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Nosema Ceranae and Honeybee Colony Collapse

How natural infection by Nosema ceranae causes honeybee colony collapse, an article by M. P. Higes et al., Bee Pathology laboratory, Centro Apícola Regional, Spain, which was presented at OIE Apimondia Symposium Freiburg 2008, appears in the current issue of Environmental Microbiology, 18 July 2008. In recent years, honeybees (Apis mellifera) have been strangely disappearing [...]

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