Stingless bees can mummify beetles in resin!

Yet another reason why bees are awesome: They can mummify beetles. Of course, we're not talking about honeybees here, but I am inspired by ALL bees, no matter what kind.

So, apparently this happens in Australian stingless bees, a species called Trigona carbonaria. Scientists placed a bunch of small hive beetles outside a laboratory hive of stingless bees. If the beetles made it past the guard bees, a group of bees in the hive attacked the beetles and coated them with a mixture of resin, mud, and wax.

How long does the mummification take? Just about ten minutes--beat that, Egyptians. The only time researchers saw this method fail was when temperatures rose above 40 Celsius and the resin didn't set. But other than that? Fool proof.

Other bees use this method as well, but the coolest one ever mixes in acid to the resin, which eats away at the beetles' hard shell. Let's face it. Bees are the coolest.

Green Bees

You must read this lovely article, "In the Key of Bee," by Erik Vance, featured in the online mag Bay Nature. In it, Vance writes about Gordon Frankie, a bee professor at UC Berkeley who specializes in native bees. I have to admit I'm a bit smitten with native bees myself lately, and am quite inspired by his work. Anyway, the article talks about several native bee varieties, such as the leaf cutting bee, who lines his hive with small, precision-cut leaf slices, and can be seen bobbing through the air with small bits of leaves. The article also talks about the work one man is doing to help preserve native bee populations, an admirable feat in and of itself. Click here for a link to the article, and for more great pics.

Photo by Rollin Coville.

I saw the White House Bees!

I went on a weekend trip to Washington D.C., to visit a friend of mine. Anyway, one of the highlights of my weekend (besides the gorgeous weather) was walking past the White House and getting a glimpse of the White House Bees! I was so excited and inspired. I don't have a heck of a lot to say about it, except that it's so exciting that the Obamas are setting a precedent for organic farming and the importance of bees in our communities and urban landscapes. This picture was taken from the City Bees Blog. Click here to see more pictures of the White House Bees.

Bee hives at the White House!

According to Bee Culture, a beekeeping magazine, and an article in the KansasCity.com, Michelle Obama has recently announced that not only will there be an organic garden at the White House, there will also be two bee hives! Apparently the bee hives belong to a White House employee who lives nearby and will tend the hives. The crops and will be used by the White House kitchen staff for the family and for official functions, while some will be donated to Miriam's Kitchen, a soup kitchen near the White House. Some of the produce will include lettuces, fennel, rhubarb, cucumbers, sweet and hot peppers, as well as berries and some herbs.

The 1,100 square foot garden will be the first of its kind since Eleanor Roosevelt planted a victory garden during World War II. Mrs. Obama broke ground on the first day of spring with a group of fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington. The students will be brought back next month for the planting and will continue to be involved during harvesting as well. Mrs. Obama said that she thinks it will encourage her children to eat their vegetables, especially if they're involved in planting and growing them.

I just think we're so blessed to have a first family taking such bold steps towards a more ecological lifestyle, setting a good example for a key part of our lives that we have to change here in this country. A Brazilian friend of mine commented the other day, "I just don't get it, Americans are the richest people in the world, but their food is so terrible and the people are so fat!" Well, maybe it's time to change that, eh? Hopefully the inspiration that the Obama's have inspired can trickle down into these other, very important parts of our lives.

I heart bumblebees! Part Three: How we can help.

I watched the documentary King Corn last night and LOVED it. It's about two men who decide to farm an acre of land in Iowa and grow corn to understand just how the crop gets into so much of our food (and bodies). It's poignant, interesting and thoughtful, and I couldn't help but think how similar the issues they're looking at are to the ones that have caused bee decline. Basically, we're both exploring the downward spiral of agriculture, and its effects on our environmental and bodily health. The King Corn website also offers some great ways to address our agricultural system on the "take action" tab in their website, which gave me some good ideas for this post.

So let's get on with it, shall we? How can we help out bumblebees (and bees in general)? First of all, it kind of depends on where you are. I'm going to tailor this to folks in the U.S., but I know there are similar resources in the UK as well. I'll start with the easiest, less complicated solutions and go from there.

• Make a bee garden. Fun fact: Bees don't see red, but do see blue, yellow, and ultraviolet. So, most of the flowers bees pollinate are yellow, and some are blue (and some are other colors too!). Check out this cool website for some tips on how to make your garden bee-friendly. Here's a bee plant list for those of you that want to get right on it.
  
• Save some wild space. If you have some land (or even just a back yard), create wild/untamed spaces for bumblebee habitat. They love long grasses, abandoned animal burrows, etc. So if you can leave some wild spaces in your yards, you'll increase wildlife diversity in general, and attract all kinds of pollinators and birds as well.
• Buy local. Support small, local farms through farmer's markets and community supported agriculture (CSAs). Small farmers farm more diverse crops than large scale agriculture and usually are much more bee friendly.
  
• Buy Organic. Because of the expensive labeling process, not all farmers can afford to be organic, but actually are. That's why shopping at the farmer's markets is so helpful because you can actually talk to the farmers and find out about their farming practices. But buying organic at the store is huge too. Why? Because, to be blunt, pesticides kill bees! So, the more we support systems that don't use pesticides, the more bees will flourish.
• Learn about the Farm Bill. Creating innovative new farming methods is one of the most important things we can do, which means we have to get involved in our politics. We have to educate ourselves. In the EU, for example, farmers are incentivized by the government (through subsidies) to leave sections of their land for hedgerows and wildflowers to attract pollinators. Got that? Farmers are PAID to leave portions of their land for bees. More bees and pollinators=higher crop yields. Farmers are also moving away from intensive pesticide use and towards organic agriculture. The challenge we face in the U.S. is that crops like corn--which are part of this huge industrial farming complex that eats up all the land--don't need bees, so there have to be other ways to incentivize farmers to keep some of their land fallow. You can get involved and write to your local senators and congress folk and get encourage them to help shape the bill.
• Join a local preservation group. A popular one in the U.K. is the Bumblebee Conservation Society. Some in the U.S. are:
• The Xerces Society--an international nonprofit that protects invertebrates
• The North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC) which specifically works to protect pollinators.
• Support honeybee and bumblebee research. One easy way to donate is through Haagan Dazs but the above preservation groups certainly need help as well.
• Tell your friends!
  

I heart bumblebees! Part Two: Why the bumblebee is in decline.

So, why have the bumblebees been in decline? Many of the articles I found concerned the U.K., which doesn't mean that the decline isn't happening in the U.S., it's just that the U.K. has been a hotbed of recent bee research. An article titled "Decline of Bumblebees (Bombus) in the North American Midwest" states: "The nature and extent of bumble bee decline in North America is poorly understood due mainly to a lack of baseline and long term data." Clearly, there are reports of bee decline in the U.S. as well, and I think that the two phenomenons are closely related.

So let's return to David Goulson's analysis. In the last blog, I wrote about bumblebee's unique characteristics, but let's point out some of the main ones that are contributing to their decline.

1. Bumblebees tend to specialize more than honeybees, and some only feed off of one plant species, like legumes (Fabaceae) for example.
   
2. Bumblebees make their homes in abandoned animal burrows (rodents, typically) and in grassy tussocks, which are usually only available in unmanaged grass and pasture lands.

Let's just think for a moment about the track our agriculture has been on. Farm lands that were once interspersed with wild flowers and grazing meadows for horses are now mono-cropped and farmed for every inch of possible land. In Iowa, for example, my boyfriend has told me how farmers will cut down sections of riparian corridor (the plants that you find along the sides of river beds) to farm corn there. ACK! That's the trouble with subsidized farm products. When the government pays more for a certain crop (think: ethanol), you get all the farmers replacing their more diverse food crops for cash crops that will yield the greatest amount of, well, cash.

But I digress. Sort of. Previously, bumblebees and honeybees would feed off of some food crops (like raspberries, strawberries, apples, and legumes) and especially off of the wild flowers that grew in the adjacent meadows and fallow pastures. Bumblebees in particular would also make their homes in the unplowed sections of farms in those abandoned rodent burrows and in hedgerows, the sections between cultivated farm lands where bushes and wild plants grow.

One of the interesting things the article about bumblebees in the Midwest pointed out was that bumblebee diversity took a sharp decline in Illinois during 1940 and 1960, which "coincided with large-scale agricultural intensification in Illinois" during that time period.

This same process has been occurring in the U.K. as well. Goulson writes that the U.K. has lost 98% of its unimproved grassland since World War II. He then goes on to say that "increased use of herbicides and improved seed cleaning mean that arable crops are now virtual monocultures, whereas once they were rich in flowering seeds."

Basically, as a result of this agricultural intensification, there has been a significant loss in wildflower diversity. When bumblebees need certain habitats and those habitats get plowed over, and when bees depend on certain flowers and those flowers aren't cultivated any more...well, you do the math. The bees go extinct.


References

Goulson, D. (2006, December). Demise of the bumblebee in Britain. Biologist. Volume 53, Number 6, 294-299. Retrieved March 04, 2009.

Grixti, J., Wong, L., Cameron, S., & Favret, C. (2009, January). Decline of bumble bees (Bombus) in the North American Midwest. Biological Conservation, 142(1), 75-84. Retrieved March 14, 2009, doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2008.09.02

I heart bumblebees! Part One: Cool facts about Bumblebees.

So, I was speaking with a colleague the other day who just happens to have a family history in beekeeping. Her father (if I'm correct) is a third generation beekeeper and also an etymologist. Anyway, we were talking about her family's bee business when she mentioned that over 5 species of bumblebees had disappeared in the U.K. recently. 5 species? That surprised me, so of course--since I teach research writing and I'm into bees--I had to go and research the fact.

I found two articles that talked about this phenomenon. One was titled "To Be or Not to Bee..." by Marianna H. Horn and Peter G. Kevan and another (not so subtly named) was called "The Demise of the Bumblebee in Britain," by David Goulson. Both articles had some enlightening things to say about bumblebees--not just why they are disappearing (which may give some clues as to why honeybees are disappearing as well), but also just some wonderful info about the lovely bumblebee in general. So, let's start there.

Some neat facts about the bumblebee from their articles:

• Bumblebees belong to the genus Bombus that includes many rare species with highly diverse ecologies. Honeybees belong to the genus Apis.
  
• Bumblebees are the larger, hairier variety of bee, often colorful as well. Honeybees, by contrast, are described by Goulson as "smaller, slender, drab, and relatively hairless." (Guess who is a little biased towards the bumblebee? I'd say Goulson, but he's starting to win me over too.)
• Bumblebees, like honeybees, feed solely on flower nectar and pollen for their energy and protein.
  
• There are only 240 species of bumblebees worldwide (contrasted with thousands of bee species in general), and they are found mostly in the Northern Hemisphere from the Arctic to the tropics.
  
• Bumblebees are endotherms, which means that they can warm themselves by contracting and releasing their flight muscles, also known as "shivering," which allows them to endure cooler temperatures than most bees.
• Bumblebees are social creatures--like honeybees. But instead of living in a hive, they live in abandoned animal burrows, or (and I LOVE this phrase) in grassy tussocks. (Basically a section of grass that grows a bit higher and more thickly than the rest.)
• The colonies that the bumblebees live in consist of about 400 worker bees (all female) with one queen. To contrast, a typical cultivated hive of honeybees has about 60,000 bees.
  
• Bumblebees can be much more specialized than their honeybee cousins in terms of what they pollinate. One species of bumblebee, for example, only pollinates plants in the pea family. This is what makes them more susceptible to extinction though because if that species dies off or isn't planted, then the bee is likely to die with it.
• Bumblebees aren't very aerodynamic, so flying demands a lot of energy. Goulson gives this great analogy. Apparently, it's been calculated that a running man consumes a Mars bar worth of energy in about 30 minutes. By contrast, a honeybee would use that same amount of energy (in bee portions) in about 30 seconds of flight. Thus, he concludes, a nest of about 400 bees would need a lot of food.
• Bumblebees do have stingers, but they're not barbed like a honeybee's. They can sting multiple times if necessary.
  

Finally--and this is from my personal experience, you can pet bumblebees! I don't recommend, it, but I remember spending time with my good friend Leaf in college, and he saw a bumblebee and leaned over and pet her as she sat on a flower. It was the sweetest thing. He said that she didn't have a stinger, which was wrong, they do, but they don't tend to sting unless their nest is threatened.

Anyway, I have a huge crush on bumblebees now. Next up--why they're dying and what we can do to save them!

(And then I swear we're going back to top bar hives! I just got so enamored all of a sudden and couldn't resist!)

Lastly--isn't this photo of a bumblebee the cutest friggin' photo you've ever seen? She's waving at us. I almost cried.

References:

Goulson, D. (2006, December). Demise of the bumblebee in Britain. Biologist. Volume 53, Number 6, 294-299. Retrieved March 04, 2009.

Horn, M., Kevan, P. (Date unknown.) To Bee or Not to Bee. Journal Unknown. Retrieved March 04, 2009.

Top Bar Hives in Kenya

So, when I took beekeeping classes last year, I studied what's known as the top bar hive, not the traditional Langstroth hive (see the colorful bee boxes in the post below). Top bar hives are much easier to build than the Langstroth hive, which makes it perfect for using in developing countries. Some would even argue that it's more ecological for the bees since they build their own comb entirely, without the wax mold that comes with the Langstroth.

We'll save that discussion for another post. For now, check out this fantastic video to learn more about the top bar hive!



Next on I Heart Bees--we'll look at Top Bar Hives in more depth, for those interested in this alternative method of beekeeping. I'll talk about why they're considered more ecological and include a video about how to build a hive. See you soon!

Top Ten Bee Facts Video

Well, the video won't let me embed it into my blog, but I will include the link here on the top ten facts about bees.

Here's the list (but still check out the video!)

1. Bees visit over 2 million flowers to make 1/2 kilo of honey (1.10 lbs).
2. For one jar of honey, bees will fly over 90,000 kilometers--55,923 miles.
3. A honey bee flies over 8km per hour (4.97).
4. The average worker bee will only make 1/2 a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime.
5. It would only take two tablespoons of honey to fuel a bee's flight around the world. (I hear this statistic a lot, but the fact is, a bee's wings wouldn't likely last long enough to fly around the world...but hey, it puts things in perspective.)
6. One honey bee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers on one collection trip.
7. Bees have been producing honey from flowering plants for between 10 and 20 million years.
8. Honeybees did not exist in North America. The Native Americans called the honeybee the "white man's fly." They were brought to North America by the colonists.
9. There are over 60,000 bees in the average bee colony.
10. A honeybee has four wings, while a fly has two.

There ya have it--with metric conversions even! But check out that link!

CCD or not CCD? That is the question.

So...got some news. Not sure what to think about it. Basically it states that scientists have not been able to come up with any hard facts about why so many friggin' bees are dying, all the same way.

Apparently, according to an article in the BBC news, "many experts now believe that the term [CCD] is misleading and there is no single, new ailment killing the bees." So--that means, according to the article--that CCD may not actually exist.

Here's a little chunk out of the article:

Conducting experiments at an isolated almond orchard in the Central Valley area of California, Frank Eischen, of the US Department of Agriculture, said it was "probably true" that there was no new single disease. "We've seen these kinds of symptoms before, during the seventies, during the nineties, and now," he added.

"It's probably not a unique event in beekeeping to have large numbers of colonies die."

Basically, the growing idea is that CCD is really a conglomeration of several different causes, like varroa mites, a lack of nutrition because of the urbanization of their pastures, and...and this is the biggie...pesticides. (Please go to the last blog and help protest unmitigated use of IMD!)

Another big concern was the intensity of the agricultural system, which has beekeepers carting bees all over the state feeding them on a few single crops year round, instead of the natural diversity of pollen and nectar that they'd find flying to diverse pastures.

Unfortunately for the bee loving community, there was also this kicker: "Some critics of the bee industry have called the whole concept of CCD a hoax, a public relations stunt designed to attract public sympathy."

Wow--a public relations stunt? There are literally unprecedented levels of bees dying around the world--the number of bumble bees in the UK has halved in the last 60 years alone--and it's a hoax designed to manipulate people? I don't agree with this sentiment.

I mean, check out those bee boxes above. Are bees supposed to live in condos? I don't think so. I'm inclined to think that there's something serious going on here that we need to continue to examine, and that this issue has brought some much needed attention to what's looking to be a broken piece of an already very broken agricultural system.

Help Protect Honey Bees from a Toxic Pesticide

Hey all!

Sorry I've been a little lax in blogging. I've been teaching more than full-time, and working to finish my novel. Anyway, here's a great opportunity to help save the bees. One of the more nefarious pesticides for honey bees is one called imidacloprid (IMD), a toxin created by Bayer Corp. What IMD reportedly does is make the bees drunk, essentially, and inhibit their navigational systems so they can't find their way home.

This letter encourages the EPA to reexamine the research on IMD, and make sure to ban its use when it has proven harmful to honey bees. Please click here and send a letter to the Office of Pesticides Programs at the EPA and spread the word!

Thanks! Here's the link.

An article I published recently on Bees

Well, this seems like the appropriate place to link to the article I wrote. So...check it out!

Is the Honeymoon Over?

I'm Back!

Hey there all of you wonderful people that have been visiting this blog! Sorry about the lack of posts lately. Besides being a bee enthusiast, I'm also a teacher and writer. I just started teaching way too many classes in January, and have also been working to complete my novel as well. So...now I should get back on track.

One other strange thing...I also couldn't write a blog post for the past week and a half because every time I tried to write my blog, it converted all the words into question marks. So frustrating! (Which would have looked like: ?? ????????????)

Anyway, I fixed that problem...just a little issue with my transliteration settings. You know how that goes. Happens everyday. ;)

My Vision

Back in March or April, I received an email stating that I'd won a scholarship to travel to New York and attend a leadership conference. I'd been chosen out of 3200 applicants along with 80 other amazing female participants. The White House Project and O Magazine, the two main sponsors, had asked us what we wanted to do to help make the world a better place. And my answer was: Save the Bees.

At the time, I'd created a plan to teach beekeeping to women in Africa and then write a book about it. While I still love this idea, what came up for me during the conference was that I wasn't as excited about the women in Africa (sorry, African women) as I was about saving the bees in general. So, I decided that what I really want is to raise money for bee research to figure out what's going on with the bee decline and get as many people beekeeping as possible.

Well--now that I've clarified my vision, I'm working on a website to do just that. I don't want to say too much about it just yet, but my goal is to get as many people beekeeping out there as possible: men, women, kids, people in cities, suburbia, and the countryside. I think that the more bees we have (as well the more bee gardens we have), the better chance we have of saving our bees.

My hope is that I'll soon have a website that can direct you to exactly what you're looking for in the bee department: You need bee equipment? Check. You need to get connected to your local beekeeping community? Check. You want the latest info on bee research and CCD? Check. Tips on beekeeping? Check. Wonder why the heck people are so wacky for bees? Check, check.

So...send me an email if you have an idea, or you want to tell me what would help you become a beekeeper or how you'd like to help in general. I'm hoping to have a one stop shop soon, so keep your eyes peeled!

Yupbees: Young, Urban, Beekeeping Professionals

Maybe I'll be the first to coin it, because I'm all about this new movement. That's right: Yupbees. (The fact that this isn't coming up as a misspelled word in my spell check only confirms that this word will join the many greats in our lexicon.)

So, there's a great article about urban beekeeping in Germany. The country, like many others, is experiencing a severe loss in its bee population. While most people typically associate bees with beautiful hillsides of lavender and apple trees, bees need to be a part of every landscape, including our urban jungles.

What's interesting is that older beekeepers are trying to make beekeeping exciting and accessible to young beekeepers in the cities. They're offering classes and mentorships to help raise awareness and interest for young beekeepers, from school children to working professionals.

Currently, hundreds of thousands of bees are flying through the neighborhoods of Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich. Apparently, the densely populated Ruhr region now houses more bees than the surrounding countryside.

A lot of people ask if they can keep bees in the city. I have a friend who actually gets better honey yields when he keeps his bees in urban bee yards. People in the city tend to grow plants and water them year-round (or at least during the growing season), which provides more bee nectar and pollen than a field of wild flowers that might die mid-summer without water. The cities are also warmer than the countryside and bees can stay active and gather food longer than they might in a rural environment.

People are keeping bees on their balconies, rooftops, and even hotel roofs. They're also in London and even Manhattan, and now--thanks to a new Denver law--they're in Denver too.

And if you're wondering about honey, here's what one beekeeper had to say about the urban gold: "City honey has an outstanding aroma," said Benedikt Polaczek, a bee researcher at the Free University of Berlin. "And besides, it's very clean, because they don't spray pesticides as much in the city." In Manhattan, "Sheriff Beekeeper" David Graves sells his Rooftop Magic Honey at a premium price.

Join the Yupbee revolution. I'm a Yupbee and proud.

More love for Haagen Dazs

Let's give it up a bit more for Haagen Dazs. They have this kickin' cool website where you can make your own bee that looks like you. (Yes, that's what I look like. Seriously.)

Anyway, you can email a bee image to a friend and then it takes you to their website where you can get education on the bee decline and the role bees play in our ecosystem. It's fun. It's free. It's educational.

Now go eat some ice-cream.

Haagen Daaz: Saving the Bees One Flower at a Time

Haagen Dazs rocks. Not only do they have this crazy cute website (complete with chirping birds and flying bees!) designed to help educate about bee decline and fund raise for bee research, they also have just announced a $125,000 donation to the University of Davis' department of Entomology to launch a nation-wide contest to design a half-acre bee garden for our beloved pollinators.

I'm not sure how to express how excited I am about this without a bevy of exclamation points. But, since I can't contain myself, here I go: WOOHOO!! GO HAAGEN DAZS and UC DAVIS!!!!!!!!

Phew. I feel so much better now that I got that out. I'm kind of against the use of frequent exclamation points, but sometimes it must be done.

(Haagen Dazs, by the way, also proves that you can become an extremely popular business with a name that no one knows how to spell or pronounce. In fact, I had to check the spelling on this company about five times while writing this post. Nice work, Haagan Dazs.)

Anyway, this genius idea will encourage landscape designers everywhere to submit a plan for a half-acre bee garden at UC Davis, to provide a haven for the honeybees used for research there. In case you didn't know, UC Davis is one of the bee research hot spots in the U.S. The garden will provide a seasonal variety of plants and flowers so the plants will have nectar and pollen year-round. The garden will also educate visitors on how they can make bee gardens of their own. The garden is expected to be the first of many pollinator gardens at UC Davis.

I can't help it--I must say it again: GO UC DAVIS!!!

As Eric Mussen, a Cooperative Extension apiculturist in the UC Davis Department of Entomology, said: "The garden will be extremely helpful in demonstrating that bees are not a nuisance in the backyard, but instead are obtaining food and water essential for their survival,"

That's right--bees are not a nuisance. They are responsible for about 1/3 of the food on your plate. In a time where there are a million different environmental causes that are--in many ways--so intangible, here's a cause that you can do something about directly, and it benefits the food on your plate. And...honey is yummy. Let's face it.

To see the original article with info about designing a bee garden, click here.
Or, to check out the Haagen Dazs website, go here: www.helpthehoneybees.com

Last, but not least, I left out a few of these: !!!!!!!!!!! It might be the caffeine I just drank (chai green tea with honey). God knows caffeine in my sensitive body is a bit like crack. But I think I'm just darn excited.

The Simpsons do Bees!

It's official. Bees are now part of pop culture. Even Lisa Simpson has her eye on the disappearing bee population. The episode is wittily titled: "The Burns and the Bees," and--though I won't vouch for the bee science in the show--it's nice to see the bee awareness spreading into pop media. The plot? Basically, Mr. Burns decides to build a sports complex in the one place where the declining bee population is thriving, and ends up getting stung financially as a result. It's cute--not The Simpsons that I knew and loved years ago, but still worth seeing. I'm glad a more mainstream audience will be exposed--even if only in a small way--to this very important issue.

You can watch the full episode of The Simpsons here. As a vegetarian (though not so strict anymore) and a frequent advocate of the environment and the oppressed (I say this a bit tongue in cheek) I have often resonated with the bleeding heart, slightly naive, Lisa Simpson. Now I do even more! If I could only get a chunky pearl necklace and that cool hairdo...

Smokers of the World, Unite!

No--I'm not talking about cigarette smokers; I'm talking about bee smokers. You can see me with a smoker in my profile picture--it looks like a tea kettle with a mini-accordion on the back, and is used to blow smoke into the bee hive to calm bees.

But what I really wanted to talk about is a protest in Britain a few weeks ago. Apparently 300 beekeepers joined together with their smokers in full effect, dressed in their Sunday best (starch-white bee suits) to protest the dramatic loss of bee hives in the U.K. We're talking 2 million bees in ONE year. Wow.

The beekeepers are angry that the government hasn't put enough money towards bee research. It's understandable why they haven't: Beekeepers don't have the same kind of sway that energy and science lobbyists do, for example...we face the same problem here in the U.S. In the U.K., about 2.4 million is being spent on bee research and to conduct hive checks, but the beekeepers would like to up that amount to 12.6 million.

Why the urgency? Check this out. According to an article about the event in UPI.com: "The beekeeper group said if the current state of deterioration continues across Britain, English honey supplies could be gone before the end of the year."

And when honey supplies are gone, we're talking about a bee decline that's so dramatic that it'll trickle down (and already has!) to farmers everywhere.

Check out the article where I found the picture, and see some other great pics here and here.

Keeping it Light

I love this comic by Lela Dowling about CCD that I found on The Daily Green's bee blog. It's wonderful! Click on this link here to see it in all its glory.