It is hot, oppressively hot. At this time of year in Maryland, no one wants to work in the colonies and the bees don’t really want you in there either – they make that perfectly clear. Most beekeepers have extracted some honey by now and may have a stockpile of wax lying about. It is […]
Throughout the year several honey bee diseases can be noted in stressed or sick colonies. There are also other stress factors that cause colony conditions to deteriorate and look very similar to sick or diseased colonies. One condition is neglected drone brood. It is caused by either a drone laying queen, laying workers, poorly mated […]
We have been working for over a year to develop a BIP hive scale that will enable beekeepers and beekeeping clubs to gather and use data from their own hives to follow nectar flows, honey production, swarm alerts, theft alerts and other valuable data about what is happening within their own colony. Having these data […]
You have read my last blog on “why bother to keep records while beekeeping” and you’re convinced. You want to keep records. That’s the attitude! So, how do you keep – good, detailed, relevant, informative, not-too-much-of-a-hassle – record? Short answer: the way you want. Longer answer: You have to pick the method that speaks to […]
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 […]
Here at the UMD BIP lab, I have been looking for tracheal mites (Acarapis woodi) in honey bee samples. Tracheal mites live in the trachea of honey bees, they enter the tracheal tubes through the bee’s spiracles. Once inside the trachea, they puncture the wall of the trachea and feed on the bee’s haemolymph. An […]
The Transition Going from being an undergraduate student only working 6 hours a week on my own independent project to being a full time worker in the Bee Research Lab has been quite a transition. During the semester, a few other undergraduate students and I worked on an independent research project counting individual nosema […]
At a glance can you tell who the imposter is? Honeybee mimics like the drone fly, shown on the above left, have been able to fool many people, especially when you just glance at one out of the corner of your eye. But why does this fly, and other mimics go through the […]
You may remember hearing in the news a while back about the appearance of zombie bees along the west coast of the United States. No, the zombie bees aren’t a result from a bio experiment gone wrong, but are honey bees being parasitized by Apocephalus borealis aka the zombie fly. The female fly finds a […]
On the eve of National Pollinator Week the largest mass bumble bee death on record occurred in a Wilsonville, Oregon parking lot. The estimated 50,000 bumble bees found dead in the Target lot had foraged on some fifty-five ornamental linden trees, confirmed by the Oregon Department of Agriculture to have been sprayed with the insecticide […]
