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…
Varroa treatments arrived in crime. In a double sense, just bear with me for a while. In a crime series I watched some days ago, the victim was a beekeeper killed while working on his colonies. Beekeeping became so popular in the past years that I see quite a lot of magazines, TV shows, social…
“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…
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