In my last post, I described how my approach to bee health changed over the years. From focussing on single bee diseases (mainly varroa…), my view got much broader. The One Health concept – which I discovered only last year – gave my ideas a frame and a name. Which I’m very happy about. It’s […]
Healthy bees – how do you define them? My approach has changed over the years. First, I was interested in single bee diseases, or more precisely, the impact of parasites on bees. With experience, it turned into a more complex approach, acknowledging connections. Over the years, I began to include also aspects that aren’t related […]
In this period of the year, I think about bee nutrition quite often. It’s the time of wild meadows, of flowering gardens and parks. The time of the discussions on which seed mixture to use and which flowers to plant to “save the bees”. There are initiatives focussing flowering road verges, others on connecting habitats […]
Pollinator decline is quite present in people’s minds in the past years. However, there’s still a lack of consciousness in an essential point: not all pollinators are the same. Not all regions are the same. Finally, not every measure to help pollinators is right for all species and/or regions. This seems trivial if you’re dealing […]
The finding that engineered bacteria could help against varroa and the Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) made a big buzz. These bacteria, Snodgrassella alvi, live naturally in the bee gut. Leonard et al. modified them to produce double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), which should interfere with crucial viral and varroa genes. Sounds crazy. But let’s go step by […]
The meaning of life, one of my professors at the university said, is to maintain yourself alive and to procreate. This may seem simplistic and against all what I usually write in this blog. And definitely not as surprising and puzzling as “42”. However, it came to my mind while reading a very exciting paper […]
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