Urban beehive
Philips has just unveiled an innovative urban beehive that enables anyone to harvest fresh hone at home. The pod-like accessory attaches to a hole cut into a pane of glass, and once secured, you’ll be able to peer into the hive while the white entryway on the outside would allow the bees the freedom come and go. Simply pull a small cord and fresh honey will come pouring out.
Continue reading… “Philips urban beehive lets apartment dwellers harvest fresh honey”
There are more than 1000,000 bees in a hive on top of City Hall in Chicago.
On top of Chicago’s City Hall is a garden with wildflowers and native grasses. In the garden stand two beehives where more than 100,000 bees come and go in patterns more graceful, but just as busy, as the traffic on the street 11 stories below.
Continue reading… “Beekeeping thrives in U.S. cities”
Even more health benefits from honey are being identified.
The Guardian reports that Welsh scientists are collecting honey to help identify new anti-bacterial drugs. The idea is not necessarily to use the honey itself, although the article notes that this is a common enough practice, but rather to identify the plants that bees have been feeding on, and then isolate compounds that may be used to develop new drugs. It’s an urgent problem…
Continue reading… “Honey could help fight MRSA and other Superbugs”
If you like a little sugar in your morning (and late morning, and afternoon) coffee, but don’t like the calories, there’s a good chance you use one of the many artificial sweeteners on the market. But there’s plenty of evidence that these various chemical concoctions carry some scary health risks with them, and that they’re no good for the environment, either. But if you insist on indulging your sweet tooth, there’s now a smart and funny flow chart to help you out…
Continue reading… “A Funny Flow Chart to Help You Choose Your Sweetener (Or Avoid One Altogether)”
An urban beekeeper.
While their country cousins’ populations collapse, bees in Paris are thriving as having a rooftop hive becomes de rigueur for hotels and restaurants seeking an in-house source of home-grown artisanal honey. According to the BBC, the urban bees are healthier and more productive than ones in rural France and they seem to like the City of Light for the same reason many people do: lots of good food.
To bee or not to be?
You may know that since about 2006 there has been a large and growing problem with the honey bees which play a large part in fertilizing our flowers and crops. Many bees, and in fact whole colonies have been dying due to an unknown factor which had been named Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD. Scientists are still working to determine the exact cause of CCD – theories range from parasites to viruses or bacteria to pesticides – but none of these have yet been agreed upon as the reason for this astounding decline…
Continue reading… “Bee Colonies Still Dying Out in Record Numbers”
To find out, Mandyam Srinivasan, an electrical engineer from the Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland and the Australian Research Council’s Vision Centre, and colleagues first built a bee-landing platform that could be inclined at any angle from horizontal to inverted (like a ceiling), then they trained bees to land on it and began filming…
Super honey to helf fight off superbugs
Honey lovers, you have a whole new reason to feel dedicated to the sweet sticky stuff. We know that honey has been used as an antibacterial for cuts and scrapes for ages. The high sugar content strips much-needed water from bacteria. But a certain type of honey may be more potent than usual, and help to fight off MRSA, a viscous strain of staph infection. Manuka honey, created from the plant native to Australia and New Zealand, seems to have super strength against it, and researchers think they’ve figured out that there’s a secret in the sauce.
Bees vs Elephant
A simple fence made from wood, wire and beehives can deter elephants from raiding farmers’ crops. A pilot study in Kenya has shown that such fences reduce the number of raids by elephants by almost half.
The work is the culmination of previous research which showed elephants are naturally scared of African honey bees.
A much larger trial is now underway in the hope the fences will provide an elegant solution to years of conflict between elephants and farmers.
Continue reading… “‘Beehive Fence’ Deters Elephants”
Researchers have discovered that honey bees can count to four, a report said here on Sunday.
Continue reading… “Scientists Say Bees Can Count To Four”
They’re cute little buggers – and they make honey too!
A U.S.-led international team of scientists says it’s identified nearly 19,500 bee species worldwide, which is about 2,000 more than previously estimated.
Research leader Michael Ruggiero of the U.S. National Museum of Natural History said the ongoing colony collapse disorder — an unexplained phenomenon that’s wiping out colonies of honey bees across the United States — highlights the need for such a worldwide checklist of bees and more information about bee species and their interactions with the plants they pollinate. Continue reading… “Bees and More Bees”
A recent survey found that about 35% of all the colonies in the U.S. died last winter. Of those that died, 71% died of natural causes, 29% from symptoms that are suspected of being colony collapse disorder. Doing the math that comes to at least 10% of all the bees in the U.S. last year died of Colony Collapse Disorder.
Continue reading… “Colony Collapse Disorder – The Global Bee Plague”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
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