“Pollination services”, “without bees our dinner tables will look differently”, “bees are important for a healthy and tasty diet” – phrases like this sooner or later come up in every campaign that wants to “save the bees”. I’ve used them myself. And probably will continue to do so, because it evokes a personal interest. However,…
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…
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…
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