People have long venerated bees for their honey production and crop pollination. Few people know that bees can do more than that. Bee byproducts are now widely used as health supplements, and doing something as simple as eating local honey can give you health benefits. This blog will review a few common bee byproducts and their physiological benefits. Honey Besides being a delicious sweetener, honey has been proven to be useful in medicine. One of the proven applications is the use of honey as a wound dressing. In this it has been shown to reduce healing times and scarring when used on wounds, even in…
Author: Tyler Connine
Bee Guts
This summer I have had the good fortune of continuing my work in the vanEnglesdorp lab, and I have learned a variety of new techniques for assessing hive health. The one I will be talking about today is a project I have just begun work on- bee autopsies. This may sound gruesome, and maybe it is, but I have thoroughly enjoyed learning how to correctly dissect and evaluate honey bee digestive tract health. This dissection, in the most basic terms, requires that the entire contents of the abdomen be removed and examined. This includes structures from the crop, or honey stomach, all the…