One year ago, on Christmas Day 2009, I sat at the dining room table with my daughter and two computers trying to figure out how to set up a blog. How does a host server work? What is WordPress? What is a plugin? How do I make all the software work together? It was sort […] Read more
Seriously. I work with bees a lot. I get stung a lot. But from time to time a honey bee really freaks me out. Yesterday was cold but I’ve been doing some experiments with moisture control and I wanted to check my hives for dampness before it got even colder—something it is supposed to do […] Read more
Protandry is nature’s way of assuring males are sexually mature and ready to mate the moment females arrive on the scene. It tends to assure reproductive success. I first heard the word when I was studying Pacific salmon, but since then I’ve run across protandry in many species. In salmon, the males travel upstream first. […] Read more
While studying pesticides in pollen, I was always curious about the potential for pollen to carry disease organisms as well. Indeed, a new study that appeared in the December 22 PLoS ONE confirmed my worst fears—that pollen may be a major route of viral infection from managed honey bees to wild native bees. The authors […] Read more
About two days before Christmas I got an e-mail from an Arizona homeowner about a swarm of bees that were hanging from the eaves of her house. She said the weather had been unusually warm, but just as it started to change for the worse, the swarm of bees arrived. She didn’t want them to […] Read more
The last sting-of-the-year is what I got yesterday. I look a little like Rudolph-the-reindeer except I took it on the chin. I also had the last sting-of-the-year a week ago–or so I thought–when I got stung on the little finger. But at this point, that one simply turned out to be the penultimate sting-of-the-year. Now, […] Read more
It is easy to blame the loss of bee habitat on “them”—them being industrial farms, expansive orchards, sprayed fields, and freeways kept neat with herbicides. But in truth, our modern cities and suburbs are just as bad. We have covered the land with mulch, decking, concrete, flagstones, bricks, pavement, and lawns. None of these things […] Read more