Entries tagged with pollinator conservation

One of my favorite blogs, The Ethicurean (here on Dreamwidth as

ethicurean_feed) posted a link to this delightful article on the common honeybee earlier: Let's Hear It For the Bees.

Though a bit heavy-handed at the end, it first goes into a lot of very interesting detail about the curious language and circadian rhythms of honeybees.

Honeybees really are nature’s little treasures. They are a centimeter or so long, their brains are tiny, and a small set of simple rules can explain the sophisticated social behavior that produces the coordinated activity of a hive. They live by sets of instructions that are familiar to computer programmers as subroutines – do this until the stop code, then into the next subroutine, and so on.

As a lifelong gardener, I've been following the news on Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which has been killing off honeybee colonies en masse for several years, pretty closely and was very excited to hear the other day that researchers may have found a cure.

Apparently the latest suspect is a parasite called Nosema ceranae and they've had very good luck improving survival rates once treatment for this particular parasite is begun.

Source

Meanwhile, I've been choosing plants for my garden specifically to attract both honey and native bees, in the hope of giving them a little bit of a hand.

A few of the useful resources I've found include:

Urban Bee Gardens
The Xerces Society
ATTRA: Native Bees

If you're not familiar with CCD, Haagen Dazs has set up a site with a helpful introduction to the topic: Help the Honey Bees. It also happens to be one of the prettiest uses of Flash I've ever seen.

Let's Hear It For the Bees!

Good news on Colony Collapse Disorder