Over the past year, Randy Oliver has published several informative articles in the American Bee Journal about the relationship between nosema disease and honey bee dysentery. If you haven’t read these pieces, you should. His message is simple: there is no evidence to support the theory that nosema disease causes dysentery. I’m dismayed, however, that […] Read more
Lots of good questions land in my inbox instead of the comments section, so I’ve decided to take a selection of these and answer them here. You may leave a comment or question below, or you may leave a question on the Contact Me page. Either way, I will try to answer them. Dogma: a […] Read more
A while back I received an intriguing letter from a homeowner complaining about his neighbor’s beehives. The letter said, in part, “This year the landowner at the rear of my house installed approximately fifteen hives. Consequently, for three months now my house and cars have been smothered in bee poop. The beekeeper has said he […] Read more
The first line in the Huffington Post story reads, “An amateur photographer has captured an amazingly rare sight in his own back garden—a bee urinating.” No doubt, the photo by Mark Parrott is awesome, but is the bumble bee actually urinating? In fact, the bee digestive system does not divide waste into solids and liquids—instead, […] Read more
Sunshine made an unexpected appearance, so I got my camera and went looking for . . . well, I really didn’t know. Just something. The trees were heavy with blossoms, the bees were soaring, and it seemed like an all-around good day for photos. What I found was completely unexpected. I started photographing a honey […] Read more
I came across this on Wikimedia while I was researching something else. The photographer describes it as: “Slowed down footage of a bee squirting a clear liquid from its anus, taken at the Auckland Botanical Gardens. Originally the event happened fast enough, 4 frames at 30 fps, that it was only viewable upon being slowed […] Read more
Although it is late fall here in the northern hemisphere, it is late spring in New Zealand. Down there the honey bees are rocketing from nest to nectar and back again, feeding their young and leaving telltale yellow splotches everywhere. Earlier this week I received a fascinating e-mail from a man on the northern end […] Read more