honeybees

It's a hard-knock life, scouring the landscape for pollen to sustain a beehive. Alight upon the wrong field, and you might encounter fungicides, increasingly used on corn and soybean crops, and shown to harm honeybees at tiny levels. [...] Read More »

The mysterious colony collapse disorder has fast been reducing the global honeybee population over the past few years, and scientists are yet to figure out exactly why. Now the Open Source Beehive project is hoping to make citizen scientists of us all by encouraging us to build or purchase open-source beehives that can be used by people to track the health of their colonies in an effort to get to the root of the problem. Read More »

As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought. Read More »

Last year, a third of honeybee colonies in the United States quite literally vanished. Commercial honey operations, previously abuzz with many thousands of bees, fell suddenly silent, leaving scientists and beekeepers alike scratching their heads. The reasons remain mostly a mystery for what is called Colony Collapse Disorder—a disturbing development of the drying up of beehives throughout the industrialised world. Read More »