Massacre In The Hive

Massacre In The Hive: Amazing Footage Of 30 Giant Japanese Hornets Slaughtering 30,000 Tiny Honeybees To Eat Their Young -- Daily Mail

Tens of thousands are dead, hundreds more of the dying lie writhing on the battlefield, powerless to protect their children.

These horrifying and yet fascinating scenes are the highlights of a three-hour battle between just 30 giant Japanese hornets and 30,000 European honeybees.

The video, from a National Geographic documentary called Hornets From Hell, shows a full-scale attack on the honeybees' comb in order that the hornets can get at their larvae.

Read more ....

My Comment: I got the chills from just watching the video.

Honeybee Losses Reported Over Winter

Honeybees are dying off and last winter U.S. populations dropped by 30 percent. NOAA

Heavy Honeybee Losses Reported Over Winter -- Discovery News

The 30 percent drop was significant, but was at least less steep than the previous winter.

* Honeybee colonies nationwide have reduced in number by 30 percent, based on a recent survey.
* The decline is higher than normal but is less than losses of 34 percent sustained for the previous winter.
* Experts encourage individuals to plant pollinator gardens and otherwise join in the fight to save honeybees.

Honeybee colonies in the United States reduced in number by 30 percent over the 2010-2011 winter, according to a recently released annual survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA).

Read more ....

How One Man And Half A Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America

The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America By Hannah Nordhaus HarperCollins 336 pp

The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man And Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America -- Christian Science Monitor

Our bees are dying in apocalyptic numbers. What does it mean to us?

Bees are amazing. That’s the first reason to read The Beekeeper’s Lament, journalist Hannah Nordhaus’s rewarding account of migratory beekeeping and the mysterious scourge stalking the domestic bee population.

For the past week I’ve been telling everyone I’ve met stories from the miraculous lives of bees, like this one about the queen bee: Dihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifd you know that she makes only one flight her entire life, when she’s a few days old, and that it’s out among the swarms of male drones where she intertwines with as many as she can before returning to her colony carrying all the sperm she’ll ever need over the course of a reproductive lifetime in which she’ll lay hundreds of thousands of eggs?

Read more ....

Australia's Honeybees To Be Devastated By The Asian Bee

Asian honeybees (right) might be much smaller than European honeybees (left), but they are much quicker, and can often get past the European bees' guards to rob their hoards. Credit: Paul Zbrowski/Queensland Government

Asian Bee Will Devastate Australia's Honeybees -- Cosmos

SYDNEY: Scientists have predicted the spread of a wild and highly invasive species of bee across Australia, and being a natural carrier of the deadly varroa mite, will likely devastate current populations of farmed honeybees.

The Asian honeybee (Apis cerana) was first identified in the north-eastern city of Cairns in 2007, after having spread from Papua New Guinea to the Solomon Islands. According to experts at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), these bees are impossible to farm and are prone to robbing farmed honeybees of their hoards and building nests in houses and letterboxes.

Read more ....

The Secret Life Of Bees

Many plants produce toxic chemicals to protect themselves against plant-eating animals, and many flowering plants have evolved flower structures that prevent pollinators such as bees from taking too much pollen. Now ecologists have produced experimental evidence that flowering plants might also use chemical defences to protect their pollen from some bees. (Credit: iStockphoto/James Knighten)

Secret Life Of Bees Now A Little Less Secret -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Feb. 6, 2011) — Many plants produce toxic chemicals to protect themselves against plant-eating animals, and many flowering plants have evolved flower structures that prevent pollinators such as bees from taking too much pollen. Now ecologists have produced experimental evidence that flowering plants might also use chemical defences to protect their pollen from some bees.

Read more ....

My Comment: Nothing can remain secret forever.