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 […]
Insect diversity, or better, the loss of it is much discussed these days. It’s definitely a good thing that insects finally get into the public discussion. However, there’s quite a lot of simplifications in it. One of them is to reduce the problem by only discussing pesticide use in agriculture. There are many other aspects […]
Managed bees, as we saw in the last post, can have a negative effect on wild bee populations. However, though honey bees are the best-known pollinator, they’re not the only managed bee species. Bumblebee rearing is common in Europe since the early 1980s. They’re used mainly for tomatoes or other crops that need buzz-pollination. And […]
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