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This makes no sense at all, but does that matter when a video has cats and boots and other stuff? It’s even got a catchy chant! Animation by Henry Edmonds, with music by Robert Clouth. -via Buzzfeed
Bees have an impressive sense of smell and New Zealand biologists now believe they may be able to train them to help identify people with tuberculosis by the faint floral odor victims of the disease develop.
“When we tested them with the tuberculosis odours we found the bees can still smell it down to parts per billion,” says Max Suckling.
Christchurch zoologists are training bees to associate the smell of the disease with a sweet treat and to stick out their tongues when it’s present.
While TB is common worldwide, it is most prevalent in poverty stricken areas and the bees could provide an inexpensive screening solution for these people.
Link Via BoingBoing
Image Via Dendroica cerulea [Flickr]
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Phillip and Jenny have four beehives in their backyard in St. John’s, Newfoundland. You’ll find plenty of beekeeping videos and information on their blog, Mudsongs. In this video, we see what they do with honey when its harvested. Link -via Bits and Pieces
Two Chinese beekeepers competed against each other yesterday in an attempt to break the world record of bee wearing (who knew?). Wearing only shorts, goggles and nose plugs, each of the men wore Queen Bees on their bodies to see who could attract the most bees in an hour. In case you’re wondering, the answer is no – each individual bee isn’t counted by someone. The number of bees is estimated by weight. Beekeeper Lc Kongjiang attracted 22.9 kilograms of bees (a little over 50 pounds) and his competition, Wang Dalin, wore about 57 pounds of bees. Unfortunately, their efforts went unrewarded: the record, held by American Mark Biancaniello, is a little more than 87 pounds.
Link via Flavorwire
Photo by ImagineChina
Sounds gross, I know, but it’s actually a pretty interesting concept. To try to call attention to the bee plight in London, Capital Bee, a campaign that promotes community beekeeping, has created a series of ads featuring dead bees. The bees encounter a number of city calamities, from getting squished on the Tube to the window washing mishap above.
The next time you have a pesky swarm of bees in your back yard, don’t call the exterminator. According to a recent study, apparently all you have to do is pull out your iPhone.
The calls act as an instinctive warning to leave the hive, but the frequency confuses the bees, causing them to fly erratically. The study found that the bees’ buzzing noise increases ten times when a cell phone is ringing or making a call – aka when signals are being transmitted, but remained normal when not in use.
Those damn dirty bees! A new study shows that bees have move advanced learning capabilities than other animals.
In a new study, researchers report that bumblebees were able to figure out the most efficient routes among several computer-controlled “flowers,” quickly solving a complex problem that even stumps supercomputers.
In this crazy world of ours, I’m always surprised how so many animals and plant species interact with one another. Sometimes two things that seem to have no connection are actually directly dependent on one another. When I recently learned that beetles, bees and beets have more in common than just a few letters in their name, I was eager to share what I learned with you guys.
Image via Thomas G. Moertel [Wikipedia]
Beetles are one of the most common types of animals in the world. There are already 350,000 known species, but scientists believe there could be up to 8 million more. New beetle species are discovered at an amazing rate of about one per hour. With so many different types of beetles, it’s hardly surprising there are around 750,000 trillion beetles on earth!
The secret to the beetle’s success is its ability to adapt to almost any environment. They can fly, swim and burrow and different species can survive on anything from tobacco to bonemeal to carpet to strychnine to fiber insulators on cables. The also survive in all types of habitats. One species, the zonocopris gibbicolis survives exclusively on the feces of land snails, living in the best possible place to get that meal –inside the snail’s shell.
As if their diets and living quarters weren’t weird enough, some beetles also have seriously strange breeding habits. The flour beetle (seen above) has sperm that attaches to the members of other beetles that breed with the same female. The sperm has a long shelf life and can then go on to fertilize the eggs of other female beetles. In fact, the female flour beetle has a one in eight chance of being fertilized by a male she never even encountered before.
Image via ©Entomart [Wikipedia]
The blister beetle spreads its larvae with the help of digger bees (pictured above) in what is called a honeytrap. The larvae cling together and form the shape of a female digger bee while emitting bee pheromones. A male digger bee will then approach the trap and attempt to mate with it, giving the larvae a chance to cling onto his chest hairs and hitch a ride to an actual mate. When they get the chance, the larvae then grab on to the female bee and catch a ride to the inside of the hive where they can feed on young bees and honey.
Don’t think for a second that bees are always the innocent victims of beetles though. The stingless bee (pictured below) takes revenge on invading beetles not by striking them down, but by mummifying their bodies in large amounts of resin, mud and wax. The beetle then slowly suffocates before shriveling up like a mummy corpse.
Image via Muhammad Mahdi Karim [Wikipedia]
Bees are fascinating creatures aside from their fighting skills. Outside of humans, bees have the most sophisticated communication systems in the animal kingdom. They can tell each other exactly how to get to a food source and how good the food is using a series of different movements. This method of communication is known as the “waggle dance.” Humans can actually translate the waggle dance and scientists can actually track down a specific flower that one bee mentions to another while under observation.
more …
Traditional folklore says that when a beekeeper dies, the bees must be told of the death promptly, or else they will either weaken and quit working, or they will flee the hive. This custom is found in far-flung locations around the world.
In China, Beehives are turned a different direction after the death of their keeper, hinting at a superstition that harkens back to a more ancient custom. Details vary, but the essence remains the same – tell the Bees, and quickly. In England circa 1840, a woman inquired if the Bees had been informed of the death of their keeper and upon learning they had not, proceeded to prepare a dish of spice cake and sugar and presented it to the hive while jingling her keys and reciting the following rhyme;
“Honey bees, Honey bees, hear what I say!
Your Master J.A. has passed away.
But his wife now begs you will freely stay,
And still gather honey for many a day.
Bonny bees, Bonny bees, hear what I say.”
The story is but a small part of Andrew Gough’s fascinating three-part post on the history of bees and beekeeping. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
The Birds and the Bees T-Shirt by Mike Jacobsen – $14.95
Birds do it, bees do it … but did they ever do it together? From the twisted imagination of Mike Jacobsen of See Mike Draw, here’s The Birds and the Bees T-Shirt over at the NeatoShop: Link
More T-shirts by Mike | Other artist designed T-shirts | More Funny T-Shirts
See also: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits
Way back in 2007, we posted an item about how cell phones might be responsible for Colony Collapse Disorder, which is affecting the world honeybee population. Now, scientists in India have published results of an experiment that corroborates the theory.
In a study at Panjab University in Chandigarh, northern India, researchers fitted cell phones to a hive and powered them up for two fifteen-minute periods each day.
After three months, they found the bees stopped producing honey, egg production by the queen bee halved, and the size of the hive dramatically reduced.
It’s not just the honey that will be lost if populations plummet further. Bees are estimated to pollinate 90 commercial crops worldwide. Their economic value in the UK is estimated to be $290 million per year and around $12 billion in the U.S.
The Mobile Operators Association in England, which represents British cell companies, disagrees with the results. Link
The Telegraph has more reactions to this report. Link
Dutch designer Tomáš Gabzdil Libertiny made a sculpture of Jesus that was completed by bees. He erected a sealed glass container with his mold inside. Libertiny then released 40,000 bees who worked on the honeycombed surface of the mold:
over the course of the fair, 40 000 worker bees were released into the case to complete a wax honeycomb structure over the figure of a martyred christ rising out of the chaos, his weight seeming to be upheld by the mass strength of the swarm. the figure within the vitrine is made of a laser sintered framework in which the industrious bees created a honeycomb skin over before filling each cell with the honey they produce. then bees worked to remove the honey from the cells and return it to the beehive, cleaning the figure back to the wax cells they originally created.
More pictures and a video at the link.
Link via Nerdcore | Artist’s Website | Photo: Carpenters’ Workshop Gallery
Also nicotine! A study conducted at the University of Haifa revealed that bees prefer nectar containing those psychoactive substances.
Flower nectar is primarily comprised of sugars, which provide energy for the potential pollinators. But the floral nectar of some plant species also includes small quantities of substances known to be toxic, such as caffeine and nicotine… Caffeine is found at concentration levels of 11-17.5 milligrams per liter, mostly in citrus flowers. In the nectar of grapefruit flowers, however, caffeine is present in much higher concentrations, reaching 94.2 milligrams per liter…
The results showed that bees clearly prefer nectar containing nicotine and caffeine over the “clean” nectar. The preferred nicotine concentration was 1 milligram per liter, similar to that found in nature. Given a choice of higher levels of nicotine versus “clean” nectar, the bees preferred the latter.
The presumption is that natural selection has favored those plants that satisfy the desires of their pollinators. Further studies are underway to ascertain whether the bees are addicted to caffeine and nicotine.
Link.
A rare species of bee uses flower petals to make a tiny nest for each egg. Two teams of researchers found nests of the Osmia (Ozbekosima) avoseta bee in Iran and watched them meticulously build the nests and line them food for the developing baby bees.
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.
See more pictures at NPR. Link -via Nag on the Lake
(image credit: Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History)
A few years ago, Alex ran a post on the Japanese hornet, a particularly large and “mean flying machine.” As pointed out, the hornets prey on smaller honeybees, but can often be baked alive by a swarm. Interesting, but that’s not what happens here as 30 hornets lay waste to a colony of 30,000 bees.
via Digg
For a few years, a British company called Inscentinel has been developing chemical-detecting honeybees for security and sanitation purposes. Bees are trained to respond to certain smells and then are loaded into cartridges that suck in air from an object. When they alert, the user knows that the chemical is present in the sample. From the company website:
Our “sniffer bees” are honeybees trained to recognise a specific odour. They are trained using a well known Classical Pavlovian conditioning protocol – a simple association of a smell with a food reward. The insect is exposed to the odour in controlled pulses and simultaneously rewarded with sugar syrup. After three to five presentations and rewards the bee is trained. When the bee detects the odour it expects a food reward and extends its tongue (proboscis). This response is a reflex action (Proboscis extension Reflex, PER) and is not consciously controlled by the bee. A “panel” of bees can be trained in as little as a few hours to remember a particular odour for several days.
Although there are a variety of newspaper articles about this invention, I haven’t found the company’s claims supported by respected scientific periodicals.
Link via CrunchGear
Keeping bees is illegal in New York City. That doesn’t mean there are no beekeepers in the city; they just keep their bees hidden on rooftops. Now a resolution to legalize beekeeping is on the table, and many are interested in starting a new hobby.
Beekeeping classes in New York City were brimming with students this spring, partly because of publicity after a city council bill was introduced to legalize beekeeping.
On one Sunday in April the student beekeepers gathered for a live demonstration of hiving.
Afterwards they got two boxes; one with about 20,000 live bees, and another smaller one with the queen bee inside.
National Geographic has a video report, including an appearance by an underground beekeeper who is allergic to bee stings! Link -via Digg
