#honeybee

#honeybee

An Update on the Bee ApocalypseRemember Colony Collapse Disorder? For years, we worried about honeybees dying off and how it would affect crop pollination. You don't hear much about it anymore. Oh, it hasn't gone away, and scientists still don't know what causes it, but the extent of the problem all depends on how you look at it. Honeybees seem to be doing okay, but honeybees are just one species of many kinds of bee. And each species has their place in the modern ecosystem. Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder puts the continuing problems with bees in perspective. The last minute of this video is an ad. -via Digg#bee #honeybee #wildbee #colonycollapsedisorder

A Robotic Beehive May Help Save the HoneybeesHoneybees pollinate so many of the world's crops that if they went extinct, our global food system could collapse. Bees numbers are dwindling, due to climate change, disease, parasites, and pollution. Some of tech's greatest minds have been searching for ways to keep bee colonies healthy and thriving, and raise the overall population of honeybees. A startup company in Beit Ha’emek, Israel, called Beewise has unveiled the first automated and autonomous beehive. They call it the Beehome. This device is big enough to house 24 colonies, which would otherwise each need a hive of their own. A solar-powered computerized system in the middle harnesses artificial intelligence to monitors the bees' activities and to respond when they need heat, cooling, moisture, ventilation, or even medicine. The system will alert a beekeeper when human intervention is needed. The system can even harvest honey! The Beehome will allow a single beekeeper to manage exponentially more hives than ever before possible. Read about the Beehome and what it can mean to agriculture at the Times of Israel.(Image credit: Beewise) #bee #honeybee #beehive #artificialintelligence #robot

Asian Honeybees Give Off Scream-Like Alarm When Being Attacked by Giant HornetsThat kind of response to predators or enemies will warn other members of its species! Researchers from Wellesley College managed to record the unique sounds honey bees (Apis cerana) make when giant murder hornets attack their area.Associate professor of biological sciences Heather Mattila and her colleagues observed that the bees make these noises at a frenetic pace as a distress signal when the hornets were outside their hive. “The pipes share traits in common with a lot of mammalian alarm signals, so as a mammal hearing them, there's something that is instantly recognizable as communicating danger,” she said. “It feels like a universal experience.”These sounds, also called antipredator pipes, are harsh and irregular, with shifting frequencies. Researchers compared it to the alarming shrieks, fear screams, and panic calls other animals make in response to predators. Aside from serving as a warning bell or a distress signal for the colony, the sounds serve as a signal for colony members to start their defensive actions, such as spreading animal dung around colony entrances to repel giant hornets and forming bee balls to kill attacking hornets collectively.#honeybee #bee #Insects #DistressSignal #environmentalresponse #danger

Honey's Eternal Shelf Life, ExplainedLeave a bottle of honey in your cupboard for years, and it may eventually crystallize, but it won't spoil. Microbes that cause food spoilage don't find honey to be accommodating, and that's because it has a low water content plus antimicrobial properties contributed by honeybees themselves. While honey is more than sugar, it is, overwhelmingly, sugar from the nectar of flowers. “Honey is hygroscopic, it draws water out of the air,” says Lewis Bartlett, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Georgia who studies honey bee diseases and evolution. “If that happens, eventually the water level will rise to a point where yeast starts growing, which makes [the honey] ferment and go rancid.” The natural process by which honey bees produce honey drastically reduces its water content, he says, to the point that nothing (not even yeast) can survive long enough within it to go rancid. As long as your honey is sitting sealed on a shelf, it can stay good forever — which explains how scientists have found honey in dry Egyptian tombs that is still good to eat!The task of removing water from nectar is complicated, but bees are also experts at adding preservatives and facilitating clean storage. Read about the honeybee's process of turning flower juice into a miracle food at Discover magazine. -via Damn Interesting (Image credit: TheCulinaryGeek) #honey #honeybee #foodspoilage #sugar #nectar