Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency has granted Apivar® an emergency registration for control of the varroa mite in honey bee hives from July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010 for every Canadian province except Newfoundland.
Apivar is a sustained-released product in the form of plastic strips impregnated with the active ingredient Amitraz.
The use of Apivar in Canada is subject to various conditions.
Apimondia 2009, the 41st annual congress of International Federation of Beekeepers’ Associations, will be held in the south of France, 15 - 20 September 2009.
The theme this is year is The bee, the sentinel of the environment:
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A research report published this month in the Journal of Economic Entomology finds that Captan is not harmful to foraging honey bees. The fungicide was first introduced in the early 1950s and still regarded as highly effective against diseases such as fruit rots and leaf blight. It is widely used on a variety of fruit and nut crops, such as apples, field berries, and almonds.
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Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture magazine and regular columnist at The Daily Green, went to the American Beekeeping Federation’s annual meeting in Nevada last month and came back with an interesting report on the state of US beekeeping — both good news, and not so good.
The good news is, and we’ve been collecting this for awhile now, is that with all of the fuss and attention, beekeepers are this fall and winter taking much better care of their bees than in the recent past.
Bee nutrition is improving, as are basic management practices such as rotating out old comb for new foundation; and Varroa treatments are settling out into solid protocols, as “those that don’t work are being phased out and those that are somewhat kinder and gentler on the bees are coming of age.”
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The British Beekeepers Association fears that another 2 billion honey bees will be lost in that country this year, at a cost to the national economy of about £54 million. But there’s also some good news for the beekeeping business in Britain.
The Farmers Guardian reports that the British government will be putting £2.3 million into the National Bee Unit, “to help its efforts to improve beekeeper husbandry and ability to deal with disease,” with a further £400,000 going to bee health research every year for the next five years.
Dennis van Engelsdorp, the Acting State Apiarist for the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, has been studying Colony Collapse Disorder and the sudden disappearance of honeybees.
In this video of a lively talk given by vanEnglesdorp at the Taste 3 food and wine conference, the “bee crusader” compares CCD to the ‘flu and explains some of the strange and mysterious discoveries about colony health that make CCD such a challenging problem — and what can and should be done about it.
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CBC radio has announced that the popular science program Quirks and Quarks, hosted by Bob Macdonald, will feature the collapse of the honeybee and the possibility of a crisis in our food supply as a result.
Honey bees are the unsung heros of agriculture — their ceaseless hunt for nectar ensures our food crops are fertilized. In fact, without the honey bee, agriculture would be in a pretty sorry state. The problem is, things aren’t looking good for bees. Over the past few years, two-thirds of the North American honey bee population has mysteriously disappeared, a disturbing phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder. American science journalist Rowan Jacobsen has been following the honey bee decline, and in his new book, Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, he explores the complex world of the honey bee, our precarious dependence on them, and the frightening consequences if they continue to die out.
This program will air on Radio One on Saturday, 24 January 2009, at 12:06 p.m., with a rebroadcast on Monday evenings at 11:06 p.m. It may also be heard on Sirius satellite radio. Past shows are usually made available on the website, for those who miss the broadcast.
