I once considered taking up beekeeping as a hobby, and still might try it when the kids move out. Treehugger has a quick overview of what beekeeping involves. Who knows? It might turn out to be a sweet deal! Link -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Flickr user Jaymi Heimbuch)

Photo: Jerome Rozen / American Museum of Natural History

These sure aren't your ordinary beehives! Behold the nest of the O. avoseta bee, which is made from flower petals:

Each nest is a multicolored, textured little cocoon — a papier-mache husk surrounding a single egg, protecting it while it develops into an adult bee. [...]

To learn more, the scientists watched the busy mama bees. Building a nest takes a day or two, and the female might create about 10 nests in total, often right next to each other. To begin construction, she bites the petals off of flowers and flies each petal — one by one — back to the nest, a peanut-sized burrow in the ground.

She then shapes the multi-colored petals into a cocoon-like structure, laying one petal on top of the other and occasionally using some nectar as glue. When the outer petal casing is complete, she reinforces the inside with a paper-thin layer of mud, and then another layer of petals, so both the outside and inside are wallpapered — a potpourri of purple, pink and yellow.

NPR's Kathleen Masterson has the fascinating story: Link

Plan BEE used 100,000 bees to create this SOS (Save Our Swarm) "bee"-llboard drawing attention to the worldwide problem of honey bee population decline. For some unknown reason, honey bees have been disappearing at an alarming rate in the past few decades. Beekeepers have noticed that more than half of their colonies have died. Honey bees aren’t even found in the wild any longer.

Dude Craft has got the 30-sec video clip: Link

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.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Link – via reddit

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by thalin.

This is some incredible artwork by Hilary Berseth, and a few thousand helpers…

Artists from Rodin to Warhol to Mark Kostabi have outsourced the construction of their work. Hilary Berseth goes them one better: He constructs basic frameworks of wire and wax, then lets teams of tiny yellow-and-black art fabricators finish the job. “I knew they were ordered and regimented,” the Pennsylvania artist says about his honeybees, which built the three otherworldly sculptures on view at Eleven Rivington. “I had an intuition that I’d be able to organize that, architecturally.”

Link – via notcot

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by JKirchartz.