“Save the bees!” was a frequent claim already when I started with BeeSafe. In the past years, this demand became ever-present. Before this, the most asked question after telling people that I work with bees was “oh, so you sell honey?” or something in those terms. Now it became “are the bees really dying?”. Very […]
The so-called “Krefeld study” brought insect declines into public attention. After Hallmann and co-workers published their results in late 2017, the media were full of scary “insect apocalypse” and similar headlines. Without always doing the subject favour, in my opinion. This 27-year monitoring also got many critics. Sometimes justified, sometimes… not that much. Overall, the […]
The claim to “save the bees” is very strong these days. In principle, this is a good thing. I really appreciate that so many people are concerned about bees and biodiversity in general. Some weeks ago, somebody asked me why “the scientists” didn’t say anything earlier about biodiversity loss. Well, we did. Already Humboldt talked […]
Bee nutrition and parasites are getting quite some attention these days. Which I’m very happy about, as I prefer to see bee health in a broader context than only the absence of diseases. I discussed this already in some posts like recently the one on honey bee welfare or the One Health Concept and the […]
Darwinian beekeeping aims to improve honey bee health by applying some principles of their biology to management techniques. Until there, it’s pretty much what we – some colleagues and me – try to establish by applying the principles of animal welfare to honey bees. By how I phrase it, you may already imagine that it […]
We speak about honey bee colonies as a superorganism. It’s something I explain very often in my work. One of my standard sentences is: “A colony is more than the sum of the number of adult bees and brood cells!”. That seems difficult to understand. It’s one of the reasons why I’m interested in the […]
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