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Coincidentally..?
Swarm of bees goes missing during heatwave
By WMNJBayley | Posted: June 23, 2017

A local beekeeper has appealed for help after his bee colony buzzed off because the weather was too hot.
Barry Kirkman had just housed the swarm in a new hive in his garden only to see them fly off three days later, yet to be seen again, reports Cornwall Live.

The beekeeper feels the sizzling weather conditions may have made the colony he had in his Tamar Valley garden to swarm and move on to find better climes.
The retired roofer, who has been beekeeping on and off for 30 years, said the heatwave, perhaps a lack of pollen or overcrowding, may have contributed to his bees looking for pastures new.

He said: "I doubt I'll see my bees again. When bees swarm they tend to find a temporary home in a tree for a few days or someone's garden before they are seen and people call in a beekeeper.
"They've probably found a new home by now. But hopefully other bees will come along and find my hives interesting and decide to stay."

Mr Kirkman posted a call for help on Facebook after his bees flew off from his Calstock home earlier this week.
The swarm was spotted flying in the direction of Albaston at the time.
But Mr Kirkman believes the 20,000 homeless bees could now be anywhere.

etc...

http://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/swa...ing-heatwave/story-30406541-detail/story.html

But Albaston is about 40 miles from Penryn - do bees swarm that far?
 
Manufacturers of the pesticides funded the study but now they query the results.

The largest study so far on the fraught question of whether neonicotinoid pesticides harm bees is providing new ammunition for those who argue against the use of the controversial chemicals.

The large-scale field study found that overall, exposure to neonicotinoids harms bee populations. In particular, the pesticides reduce honeybees’ ability to survive their winter hibernation, say researchers.

“We’re showing significant negative effects at critical life-cycle stages, which is a cause for concern,” says Richard Pywell, who studies sustainable land management at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology near Wallingford, UK, and is co-author of a paper resulting from the experiment, published on 29 June in Science1.

However, the work was mainly funded by two major neonicotinoid makers, Bayer CropScience and Syngenta. They question the scientists’ conclusions and defend the pesticides, which are already banned or restricted in several countries. The researchers who did the work say they were totally independent. ...

http://www.nature.com/news/largest-ever-study-of-controversial-pesticides-finds-harm-to-bees-1.22229
 
40,00 Bees Stolen In Anglesey

An experienced beekeeper is suspected of stealing 40,000 bees from Anglesey in one of Britain’s biggest bee rustling cases in years.

Only someone with a bee suit and veil could have pulled off the heist on Paul Williams’s hive in Rhydwyn “without getting stung to smithereens”, police said.

The miserably rainy summer could have ruined the thief’s own honey production and driven them to carry out the theft, one expert has suggested.

Bees do not like rain, she said. “When it is rainy the bees don’t fly every day, or they can only go out for a couple of hours when there is a break between showers.

“All the wet weather will help the flowers produce a lot of nectar, but the bees can’t get out. If the bees live somewhere without a lovely big patch of flowers nearby they may fly up to 13km [8 miles] to collect the pollen and nectar, but if it’s rainy they won’t make it that far in the gaps between showers.”

Instead the bees stay in their hive and eat their own honey while they wait for the sun to come out.

Williams keeps bees as a hobby in a ditch in a field in Rhydwyn on Anglesey. He checks on his swarm weekly but found the £400 hive and the 30,000-40,000 bees inside had been taken sometime between 26 July and 2 August.
 
Beenapping, it happens!!!!

If you want to take the risk, you don't need the full kit, just stuff the front opening with paper, grass or a piece of sponge, lug it off site & shove the hive into the back of your van &/or car, & just hope that it doesn't leak, (woodpecker holes or just cracks or chips) or sometimes sections separate, even though the bees tend to glue them together with propolis.

Mind you, as my dad said many years ago:- "You may look bloody stupid boy, driving in a full bee suit. But you'll look bloody worse if the hive cracks open".

I tended to transport bees with me dressed in a full bee suit, with the hood unzipped but ready to go, (although it can be awkward to pull it up in an enclosed space) & always had a few bees that got loose & tended to congregate on the back window, no need of the hood.

The only time I fully suited up in transit, was when I was returning some supers I'd extracted the night before & some local bees, (not mine), had got in through holes, (see above), to remove the residual honey. The back window of the van was totally covered by bees & I was driving on wing mirrors. No problem for me, but the driver behind was so mesmerised by the bees covering my back window, that when I signalled right & slowed down, he almost ran into my rear. I can still remember the squeal of brakes.

Happy days!!!!!!!
 
What are they complaining about? Lots of people would be happy to get the free honey.

A gigantic bee hive has been removed from a house after the owners noticed honey "oozing" through from their loft.

Hundreds of bees were found at the grade II listed 18th Century house, in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, earlier in August.

The homeowners, who did not want to be identified, found the "sticky substance" near a light fitting.

Heritage insurers Ecclesiastical said its bee expert cut a hole in the ceiling and made the "surprising" find. ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-41036111
 
This reminds me of a story by Scots comedian Chick Murray. He was in a restaurant and asked for some honey. The waitress gave him a plate with a small spot of honey on it. He looked at her and said "I see you keep a bee."

Scots woman keeps house-trained bumble bee as pet - and even cuddles it
Scientists are baffled by the special bond shared between Fiona Presly and her buzzing friend.

  • Andrea O'Neill
    • 06:00, 19 MAR 2018
    NEWS
    Fiona-Presly.jpg

    Fiona Presly is the first known person to keep a bumblebee as a pet (Image: Internet Unknown)
    A science boffin is buzzing over the discovery of the first known pet bumblebee in the Scottish Highlands.

    Fiona Presly has cared for a bumblebee queen since rescuing the dying wingless creature from her garden last spring – and the pair have formed a special bond that could rewrite science books.

    The library assistant, from Inverness, even cuddles the buff-tailed insect, which she claims is “housetrained”.

    Fiona said: “I found her when we were getting work done in the garden. It was lucky I didn’t stand on her. She must have just come out of hibernation.

    “I put my hand down and she crawled on to it. I looked at her and thought, ‘Something’s not right here, she’s got no wings’.”

  • etc

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/scot-library-assistant-becomes-first-12210269
 
When film director Dario Argento wanted a bee to land on actress Jennifer Connoly's hand through the window of a moving car for 'Phenomena' AKA 'Creepers', that's exactly what he got. Money was no object for Dario. He had the car's roof removed, the car on a rig, a perspex box type device built around the car and then employed some sort of expert to perform surgery on a bee to remove its sting. A thin piece of fishing line was then re-inserted back into the bee, the bee was 'woken back up' and now on a more controllable kite type line ..

I've got a video cassette somewhere showing this surgery and of it being filmed, I think it was part of the 80's Masters Of Horror collection ..


.. animal/insect cruelty aside, the otherwise unremarkable money shot begins @ 8:28 and the bee flying around inside a car fun and frolics continue from there .. all of that work just for a bee to land on a young woman's hand pre CGI ..

 
I saved a bee the other day, it was trapped behind a window box on the sill so I gave it a little sugar water and put it on a flower, and it flew away shortly after. They don't live very long, granted, but it's nice to give even a bee a new lease of life.

I was hearing on the radio they can even recognise human faces! Don't know how handy that would be, though.
 
I saved a bee the other day, it was trapped behind a window box on the sill so I gave it a little sugar water and put it on a flower, and it flew away shortly after. They don't live very long, granted, but it's nice to give even a bee a new lease of life. ...

If you find a honeybee struggling in water, gently move your open palm underneath ti, lift it up, and place it on something solid. It won't sting you.

My (beekeeper) grandfather taught this to me and the other 3 grandchildren early on, and it always worked as he said it would.
 
I saved a bee the other day...
So did I! It was a black worker bee that had flown into the house and got trapped in the lightshade. I think the heat from the bulb made it sleepy, so I rescued it before it was too late.
 
This new study claims bees are not only capable of counting, but also understand the concept of 'zero'.

I strongly suspect the researchers are reading 'way too much into their results, but it's interesting at face value ...

Math Bee: Honeybees Seem To Understand The Notion Of Zero
Honeybees understand that "nothing" can be "something" that has numerical meaning, showing that they have a primitive grasp of the concept of zero.

That's according to a newly published study in Science, which shows that bees possess a mathematical ability once thought to exist only in dolphins, primates, birds and humans who are beyond the preschool years.

"This is quite amazing, in my view, that bees can really do it," says Andreas Nieder, a scientist who studies how animals' process the idea of "nothing" and was not part of the research team.

He says zero was discovered relatively recently in human history, and was essential in the development of both mathematics and science. "It's a hard and very abstract concept," Nieder says. "It is a sort of eccentric uncle in the number family."

Previous experiments have shown that honeybees have some facility with numbers, because they were able to count landmarks as they foraged around for a sweet reward. But in these tests, the insects couldn't count very high — only to about four.

Still, that made a team of researchers in Australia and France want to explore what else the bees could do with numbers. Scarlett Howard at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, lured bees to a wall where they were presented with two square cards. Each card had a different number of black symbols, such as dots or triangles.

Howard trained one group of bees to understand that sugar water would always be located under the card with the least number of symbols. ...

The bees quickly learned to fly to the card with the fewest symbols, an impressive feat.

But then they got another test: The researchers presented the bees with a card that had a single symbol — and a blank card that had nothing on it.

The bees seemed to understand that "zero" was less than one, because they flew toward the blank card more often than you'd expect if they were choosing at random — although they weren't that good at distinguishing between the two.

It got easier for them when they had to compare zero with a larger number. "When we showed them zero versus six, they did that at a much higher level than zero versus one," Howard says. "So what tells us is that they consider zero as an actual quantity along the number line. They're actually better at doing zero versus six because those two numbers are further apart." ...

FULL STORY: https://www.npr.org/2018/06/07/6178...n-of-zero?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=science
 
A football match in Ecuador came to a sudden halt due to an unlikely pitch invasion - by a swarm of bees.

The game between second division sides LDU Portoviejo and Manta FC was in full swing on Saturday night when a Manta FC player suddenly dropped to the ground in the 27th minute.

Within seconds, other players and officials had followed suit, throwing themselves flat onto the pitch in rapid succession.

http://www.theweek.co.uk/94200/vide...letter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter

 
The thing that surprised me about this story? ... The NYPD has a bee keepers unit!

Buzz off! Bees swarm Times Square hot dog stand
A swarm of bees had caused a brief commotion in Times Square in New York City after they made their home atop a hot dog stand.

It happened at 43rd Street and Broadway at about 2 p.m. Tuesday.

The New York Police Department’s bee keepers unit responded to the scene and safely removed the bees.

WABC-TV shows thousands of bees crowding the top of the vendor’s umbrella as a beekeeper sucks them into a hose.

In a tweet, the NYPD said that “no tourist was harmed and no bee was left behind.”

SOURCE: https://apnews.com/a8a89533a9ed4453985d695886296594/Buzz-off!-Bees-swarm-Times-Square-hot-dog-stand
 
I've actually seen a swarm similar to this gather around a neighbors horse chestnut tree. kind of fascinating and bit scary at the same time.

I was down at Bisley rifle range in August 2012. While shooting, we had the privilege of watching a swarm form on the table being used by the black powder shooters next to us. I took a few photos as opportunities arose:

DSC_0272.jpg


DSC_0274.jpg


DSC_0283.jpg


DSC_0286.jpg


DSC_0289.jpg


I wasn't able to capture the moment of the swarm's - er - capture, but here's Bisley's beekeeper (!) having just loaded it into the box:

DSC_0307.jpg


As far as I know, nobody was stung.

See: shooting can be dangerous!

maximus otter
 
World's biggest bee found alive

Known as Wallace's giant bee, the insect is named after the British naturalist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace, who described it in 1858.

Wallace, who co-developed the theory of evolution with Charles Darwin, described the bee as, "a large black wasp-like insect, with immense jaws like a stag-beetle".

Scientists found several specimens in 1981, but it has not been seen since. In January, a team followed in Wallace's footsteps on a journey through Indonesia in an attempt to find and photograph the bee.

The giant bee - which is as long as an adult's thumb - was found on a little-explored Indonesian island. After days of searching, wildlife experts found a single live female, which they photographed and filmed.

"It was absolutely breathtaking to see this 'flying bulldog' of an insect that we weren't sure existed anymore, to have real proof right there in front of us in the wild," said natural history photographer, Clay Bolt, who took the first photos and video of the species alive.

"To actually see how beautiful and big the species is in life, to hear the sound of its giant wings thrumming as it flew past my head, was just incredible. "
_105736225_cbolt.jpg


Size comparison with European Honeybee

_105738318_mediaitem105738317.jpg
 
Hmmm, might explain a few mysterious Hums.

A couple in the Spanish town of Pinos Puente has discovered the reason for the constant buzzing noise in their bedroom - a massive bee nest behind the wall.

The couple had spent two years not knowing where the droning sound that kept them awake at night was coming from, until one day they found the culprit, the 20 Minutos news site reports. They called in professionals to confirm their suspicions and escort the unwanted visitors from the house. Bee relocation expert Sergio Guerrero was at hand and ready to carry out the delicate operation. He told the Ideal newspaper that the swarm was so big it took him hours to extract it from the wall cavity and release the bees into the wild.

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-48348561
 
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A stowaway Turkish bee was issued a death sentence by UK authorities, but it escaped before they could kill it ...
Turkish bee ordered to be destroyed evades authorities in Britain

A Turkish bee that stowed away to Britain with a vacationing family was handed a death sentence by the government, but escaped before it could be carried out.

The Toy family of Bristol said the Turkish bee, believed to be an osmia avosetta mason bee, apparently stowed away in their luggage when they returned from a vacation to Turkey, and the insect's cocoons were found in their garden.

The Department for Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs said the bee is to be captured and destroyed out of fear it could be dangerous to native bees. The British Beekeepers Association said the bee could carry non-native viruses that British bees can't fight off, or it could out-compete native bees for food.

The Toy family said the bee disappeared from their yard before it could be destroyed. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2019/0...-evades-authorities-in-Britain/7651564679722/
 
Insects are reported as being in steep decline in some parts of the world. ...
The bees certainly are ... But yes, a lot of insects are losing their habitats thanks to climate change.

Several possible causes for Colony Collapse Disorder have been proposed, but no single proposal has gained widespread acceptance among the scientific community. Suggested causes include: infections with Varroa and Acarapis mites; malnutrition; various pathogens; genetic factors; immunodeficiencies; loss of habitat; changing beekeeping practices; or a combination of factors. A large amount of speculation has surrounded a family of pesticides called neonicotinoids as having caused CCD.

Honey producing colonies in the United States increased 4% to 2.8 million in 2018.

Limited occurrences resembling CCD have been documented as early as 1869 and this set of symptoms has, in the past several decades, been given many different names (disappearing disease, spring dwindle, May disease, autumn collapse, and fall dwindle disease).

Most recently, a similar phenomenon in the winter of 2004/2005 occurred, and was attributed to varroa mites (the "vampire mite" scare), though this was never ultimately confirmed.

The cause of the appearance of this syndrome has never been determined. Upon recognition that the syndrome does not seem to be seasonally restricted, and that it may not be a "disease" in the standard sense—that there may not be a specific causative agent—the syndrome was renamed.

A well-documented outbreak of colony losses spread from the Isle of Wight to the rest of the UK in 1906. These losses later were attributed to a combination of factors, including adverse weather, intensive apiculture leading to inadequate forage, Acarine (tracheal) mites, and a new infection, the chronic bee paralysis virus, but at the time, the cause of this agricultural beekeeping problem was similarly mysterious and unknown.

Reports show this behavior in hives in the US in 1918 and 1919...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder

maximus otter
 
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Not looking good for Bees. Must be a guesstimate unless they've counted the bodies, nevertheless..

500 million bees have died in Brazil in three months

More than 500 million bees have died in Brazil in the last three months.
In the state of Rio Grande do Sul, 400 million dead bees were found - with beekeepers in four states reporting the mass deaths.

Researchers have blamed the use of pesticides

The EU imposed an almost total ban on neonicotinoids last April because of the serious harm it could cause to bees.

But in the same year Brazil lifted restrictions on pesticides - despite opposition from environmentalists who called it the "poison package".

The use of pesticides in Brazil has increased, according to Greenpeace, with 193 products containing chemicals banned in the EU being registered in Brazil in the last three years.

The country uses pesticides because its economy is so reliant on agriculture.

Elsewhere

In the United States, beekeepers lost four in 10 of their honeybee colonies in the past year, making it the worst winter on record.

In Russia 20 regions reported mass bee deaths, with officials also warning it could mean 20% less honey being produced.

At least one million bees died in South Africa in November 2018, with fipronil being blamed.

And countries such as Canada, Mexico, Argentina and Turkey have all also reported mass die-offs of bees in the last 18 months.
 
Eeeek!

Man, 25, has colony of bees settle on his backside while on his way to a garage in 'rare natural phenomenon'
  • Velelhu, 25, had a colony of bees settle on his backside in Nagaland, India
  • Happened after their Queen flew into his car and landed on his nether regions
  • Unusual footage from August 20 shows the insects clinging onto his jeans
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...way-garage.html?ito=social-twitter_mailonline
 
Bees have a reciprocal problem, when Lizzibet, our own, tiny hive-monarch, takes flight and clings to the arse of some innocent drone.

All her hangers-on follow; the insect is soon covered in lashings of Royal Jelly and brought crashing to the ground.

It is yet to be captured on film but is worth waiting for. :salute:
 
Eeeek!

Man, 25, has colony of bees settle on his backside while on his way to a garage in 'rare natural phenomenon'
  • Velelhu, 25, had a colony of bees settle on his backside in Nagaland, India
  • Happened after their Queen flew into his car and landed on his nether regions
  • Unusual footage from August 20 shows the insects clinging onto his jeans
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...way-garage.html?ito=social-twitter_mailonline
The solution? Don't put honey in your bumhole.
 
Shocking news.

Power lines could be messing with honeybees by emitting electromagnetic fields that can alter the insects’ behavior and ability to learn.

In the lab, honeybees (Apis mellifera) were more aggressive toward other bees after being exposed to electromagnetic fields, or EMFs, at strengths similar to what they might experience at ground level under electricity transmission lines, researchers report October 10 in PLOS One. Those exposed bees also were slower to learn to respond to a new threat than unexposed bees were.

“The reductions in learning are pretty concerning,” says Sebastian Shepherd. The entomologist worked on the new study at the University of Southampton in England before moving to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “These were bees that were very happy and healthy” before being exposed to EMFs in the study.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/power-lines-may-mess-with-honeybees-learning-behavior
 
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