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…
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…
The EFSA bee guidance exists since 2013. From the very beginning, it has produced discussions, harsh criticism as well as positive voices. This guidance gives a framework for the registration of pesticides, for all the studies, evaluations and data in the dossiers. However, it wasn’t implemented until now. In July, the European Commission (EC) instructed…
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…
One health is a quite recent concept. It comes from the insight that humans, domestic animals and wildlife face similar health issues. As the OIE (the World Organisation for Animal Health) puts it: “Human health and animal health are interdependent and bound to the health of the ecosystems in which they exist. ” This was…
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