Happy Birthday Charles Henry Turner by Ron Miksha

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bee biology, birthday, Charles Henry Turner, famous beekeepers, honey bee behavior

Charles Henry Turner (February 3, 1867 – February 14, 1923)

Here’s an excellent post by Ron Miksha of badbeekeeping blog recognizing a bee scientist who went unrecognized in his own time. Thanks Ron for bringing many of us up to speed.

You probably know that Karl von Frisch figured out how honey bees use their waggle-dance to communicate. He won the Nobel Prize for that and for other studies of bee behaviour. I think it was well-deserved and his experiments withstood criticism and independent confirmation. His discovery was intuitive and required hundreds of replicated experiments conducted over years of work in personally risky circumstances in Nazi Germany. But there is another scientist who came close to figuring out many of the things which brought von Frisch fame. The other scientist did his experiments in America, decades earlier. But he’s mostly unknown, largely forgotten.

Read entire article at: The Man Who Discovered that Bees Can Think — Bad Beekeeping Blog

For Good of the Colony, Sick Honey Bee Brood Sounds the Alarm By Kaira Wagoner, Ph.D.

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bee biology, biology, honey bee biology, honey bee brood, sick bees

Pollinator health is a top priority these days, and everyone seems to be asking, “What can be done to save the bees?” Since most of the current challenges to pollinator health can be attributed to humans, there are several things we can do, from restoring pollinator habitat by planting pollinator-friendly natives to curbing our use of harmful pesticides.

This work is both ecologically and economically important, as honey bees are the most agriculturally important pollinator worldwide, contributing over $15 billion to annual crop yields in the United States alone. But honey bees have flourished on Earth for over 100 million years, so perhaps it is also worth asking, “What can honey bees do to help themselves?”

As social insects, closely related honey bees live in crowded colonies with frequent physical contact, a recipe for the rapid spread of parasites and pathogens. As a result, honey bees have evolved some fascinating social immune mechanisms, which help mitigate the spread of disease between sisters in a bustling colony. One such immune mechanism is “hygienic behavior,” the ability of adult bees to detect and remove unhealthy brood from the colony. By sacrificing a few unhealthy young, the overall health of the colony, and thus the probability of colony survival, is improved.

Read the fill article here: For Good of the Colony, Sick Honey Bee Brood Sounds the Alarm — Entomology Today

Gardeners can ‘bee friendly’ with little effort by Day by Day

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bee biology, ecology, gardening and pesticides, honey bee biology, insecticide use

Robert Frost’s “A Prayer in Spring” reads in part: “And make us happy in the happy bees / The swarm dilating round the perfect trees / And make us happy in the darting bird / That suddenly above the bees is heard.”

We know honeybees produce the sticky, sweet nectar that we spread on toast or pour into recipes. More than 4,000 species of bees are native to North America.

Some consider bees pests. Some unwittingly kill the good bugs and bees while using broad methods to kill true pests. It’s important to know the difference and how and why to prevent extinction of the tiny things that matter.

Birds & Blooms magazine calls all bees unsung heroes that work hard to keep our food web functioning: “One in every three bites of food we eat is courtesy of pollination, and 85 percent of flowering plants and trees rely on pollinators for survival.”

Read full article here: Gardeners can ‘bee friendly’ with little effort — Day by Day

A quick-start guide to honey bee antennae by Honey Bee Suite

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antennae, bee biology, beekeeping, Honey bee

Every few weeks a photo of a fly lands in my inbox, always accompanied by the same question: “What kind of bee is this?” The answer is simple. If your insect has short, stubby, barely visible antennae, it is not a bee.

On the contrary, a bee antenna is long, graceful, mobile, and insanely cute. But beyond that, the antennae are a bee’s major data collection tools, containing receptors for touch, taste, and smell. Antennae can also detect temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide, along with gravity and wind speed.¹ Much of what a bee “knows” arrives through those two slender filaments.

The word antenna is derived from the Latin antemna. On Roman sailing ships, an antemna was a type of horizontal mast-mounted spar designed to spread square-rigged sails. With a little imagination, perhaps you too can envision your bees with rigging. Sail ho!

Read full article here: A quick-start guide to honey bee antennae — Honey Bee Suite

A Bee’s Eye View of the Garden — Native Beeology

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bee biology, colors bee see, honey bee biology, planting for bees

Planning a Garden With Bees in Mind –

The sweeping vista of flower filled meadows is a sight to behold yet aesthetics are a side effect to the flowers true intent. Flowers are not seeking human admiration but seeking the attention of pollinators. Through visual cues, the flowers are shouting… “Pick me! Pick me!”   A closer look reveals that over evolutionary time flowers have gone to extreme lengths to get the attention of their preferred pollinators: whether insect, bird, bat or wind.    Many factors come into play in regards to attracting any pollinator including colorful (or not colorful) petals and sepals, nectar guides, good or bad smells (or lack of) and overall shape and size. These features are often characterized as pollinator syndromes and understanding them can clue you in as to who might be most likely to visit a particular flower. If you are planning a garden that caters to our native bees it important to understand the type of flowers that they are most attracted to. Here are a few pointers to understanding the bees-eye view of the world.

Read full article at: A Bee’s Eye View of the Garden — Native Beeology