Here’s how bees and butterflies see flowers

 Humans are blind to ultraviolet light, but bugs can see it, and boy are they lucky! Ultraviolet florescence photography gives us a hint of how flowers look to pollinators.

Insects see the world very differently from how humans see it. They can’t see red light like we do, but can see ultraviolet wavelengths invisible to the human eye.

Credit: Craig Burrows

We’ll never be able to see the world exactly as they do, but a special type of photography called ultraviolet-induced visible fluorescence photography can give us a hint at how awesome the world looks to bugs… especially the world of flowers, which emit their own florescence after being exposed to ultraviolet light.

California photographer Craig Burrows has done some amazing work with this type of photography, soaking the flowers in ultraviolet light, turning it off, and then snapping a photo of the flowers emitting the light they’ve just absorbed with a special lens filter.

It’s obviously not exactly as bugs would see the flowers, as they are seeing the UV light reflected off the flowers under the sun, not fluorescing in the afterglow of a darkened room, but it gives you an idea.

A 2019 study found the parts of the flowers that reflect UV light are important advertisements for attracting pollinators.

The UV reflecting vs UV absorbing (UV dark) parts of the flower, help the bees navigate between petals and pistils (or stamens), helping them find the pollen, a 2009 study found.

(Source: Return to Now)

Honeybee venom 'kills some breast cancer cells'

Australian scientists say the venom from honeybees has been found to destroy aggressive breast cancer cells in a lab setting.

The venom - and a compound in it called melittin - were used against two cancer types which are hard to treat: triple-negative and HER2-enriched.

Getty Images

The discovery has been described as "exciting", but scientists caution that further testing is needed.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer affecting women around the world.

While there are thousands of chemical compounds which can fight cancer cells in a lab setting, scientists say there are few which can be produced as treatment for humans.

Bee venom has previously been found to have anti-cancer properties for other types of cancer such as melanoma.

The study by the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research in Western Australia was published in Nature Precision Oncology, a peer-reviewed journal.

What did the researchers find?

It tested venom from over 300 honeybees and bumblebees.

The honeybee extracts were found to be "extremely potent", said Ciara Duffy, a 25-year-old PhD researcher who led the study.

One concentration of the venom was found to kill cancer cells within an hour, with minimal harm to the other cells. But the toxicity increased for other dosage levels.

The researchers also found the melittin compound on its own was effective in "shutting down" or disrupting cancer cell growth.

While melittin naturally occurs in honeybee venom, it can also be synthetically produced.

Dr Ciara Duffy led the research. HARRY PERKINS INSTITUTE

Traditionally, triple-negative breast cancer - one of the most aggressive types - has been treated with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. It accounts for 10-15% of breast cancers.

Could it be used in the future?

On Wednesday, Western Australia's chief scientist described the research as "incredibly exciting".

"Significantly, this study demonstrates how melittin interferes with signalling pathways within breast cancer cells to reduce cell replication," said Prof Peter Klinken.

"It provides another wonderful example of where compounds in nature can be used to treat human diseases."

But the researchers warn more work is needed to see if the venom could actually work on scale as a cancer-fighting drug.

Other cancer researchers concur. "It's very early days," said Associate Prof Alex Swarbrick, from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney.

"Many compounds can kill a breast cancer cell in a dish or in a mouse. But there's a long way to go from those discoveries to something that can change clinical practice," he told the BBC.

(Source: BBC)

'Like sending bees to war': the deadly truth behind your almond-milk obsession

Bees are essential to the functioning of America’s titanic almond industry – and billions are dying in the process

Dennis Arp was feeling optimistic last summer, which is unusual for a beekeeper these days.

Thanks to a record wet spring, his hundreds of hives, scattered across the central Arizona desert, produced a bounty of honey. Arp would have plenty to sell in stores, but more importantly, the bumper harvest would strengthen his bees for their biggest task of the coming year.

Dennis Arp stands for a portrait near a colony of honeybees outside Rye, Arizona. Photograph: Caitlin O’Hara/The Guardian

Like most commercial beekeepers in the US, at least half of Arp’s revenue now comes from pollinating almonds. Selling honey is far less lucrative then renting out his colonies to mega-farms in California’s fertile Central Valley, home to 80% of the world’s almond supply.

But as winter approached, with Arp just months away from taking his hives to California, his bees started getting sick. By October, 150 of Arp’s hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his inventory in just a few months. “My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives,” he says.

This shouldn’t be happening to someone like Arp, a beekeeper with decades of experience. But his story is not unique. Commercial beekeepers who send their hives to the almond farms are seeing their bees die in record numbers, and nothing they do seems to stop the decline.

A recent survey of commercial beekeepers showed that 50 billion bees – more than seven times the world’s human population – were wiped out in a few months during winter 2018-19. This is more than one-third of commercial US bee colonies, the highest number since the annual survey started in the mid-2000s.

Adam Arp, Dennis’s son, works outside Rye on 8 May 2019. Photograph: Caitlin O’Hara/The Guardian

Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: 

America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature’s most delicate natural processes.

Honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. But California’s almond industry places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably productive year after year.

Commercial honeybees are considered livestock by the US Department of Agriculture because of the creature’s vital role in food production. But no other class of livestock comes close to the scorched-earth circumstances that commercial honey bees face. More bees die every year in the US than all other fish and animals raised for slaughter combined.

Beehives stand stacked along a blooming almond orchard near Shafter, California. The bees pollinate many crops, including almond trees in February, and are essential to the food chain. Photograph: Ann Johansson/Corbis via Getty Images

“The high mortality rate creates a sad business model for beekeepers,” says Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back.”

Nuts for almonds

California’s $11bn almond industry has grown at an extraordinary rate. In 2000, almond orchards occupied 500,000 acres. By 2018 that had more than doubled – almond groves in the Central Valley now blanket an area the size of Delaware, producing 2.3bn lb of almonds annually sold around the world.

The average American eats 2lb of almonds every year, more than in any other country. US almond milk sales have grown 250% over the past five years to reach $1.2bn, over four times that of any other plant-based milk, according to a 2018 Nielsen report.

Top: Dennis Arp works his hives outside Rye. 

Bottom: A colony of honeybees hard at work for Mountain Top Honey Company outside Rye.

“We don’t see a cap on growth at this point, especially with the incredible versatility of almonds in foods,” says Richard Waycott, president and CEO of the Almond Board of California, a not-for-profit advocacy organization representing the majority of farmers.

But these enormous orchards can’t function without bees.

It wasn’t that long ago that beekeeping was mostly a boutique pursuit of the gentleman apiarist. When European immigrants introduced their own version of agriculture to North America, they also imported the art of beekeeping, along with boxes of Apis mellifera, the domesticated European honeybee.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, beekeepers earned a modest living selling beeswax and honey. But in the late 20th century there was a titanic shift, exemplified by the career of Dennis Arp.

Arp, 67, got into beekeeping nearly four decades ago when he established his Mountain Top Honey company in Flagstaff, Arizona. A commanding presence with biceps toned from hoisting heavy bee boxes, Arp is the sort of diligent beekeeper who spends his days driving between apiary sites, and his nights studying online forums, reading articles on the latest mite treatment.

An almond tree blooms near Visalia, in California. Photograph: Ann Johansson/Corbis via Getty Images

When cheap imported honey began cutting into Arp’s profits in the 1980s, he decided to send some of his hives with a beekeeper friend to pollinate almonds in California. A decade later he struck up a deal of his own with an almond grower in California’s Kern county. With that strategic move, Arp joined the growing ranks of migratory beekeepers in the US who still sell honey but mostly travel the country from one pollination site to the next with stacks of bee boxes in tow.

In the early 1980s, when Arp was just selling honey, he would lose about 5% of his hives per year to disease or weather conditions. Around 2000, Arp’s bees started dying in greater numbers.

First, he experienced a nearly 100% loss of his hives from an infestation of tracheal mites. Then he had to cope with the intrusion of Africanized “killer” bees. And finally, what he still considers the bane of his business, a parasitic mite called Varroa destructor, literally sucked the life out of his bees. The mite feeds on the bee’s plump body, destroying the insect’s immune system and other vital functions. If Arp doesn’t apply regular chemical treatments for the mites, his colonies will die.

Arp and his son Adam. Photograph: Caitlin O’Hara/The Guardian

Now Arp finds himself in a vicious circle: he is constantly battling to keep enough bees alive to meet the requirements of his almond contract. But if he was not pollinating almonds, maybe his bees would be healthier.

This year Arp’s bees, like more than two-thirds of the United States’ commercial honey bee population, will spend February in the toxic chemical soup of California’s Central Valley, fertilizing almonds one blossom at a time.

Pesticides are used for all kinds of crops across the state, but the almond, at 35m lb a year, is doused with greater absolute quantities than any other. One of the most widely applied pesticides is the herbicide glyphosate (aka Roundup), which is a staple of large-scale almond growers and has been shown to be lethal to bees as well as cause cancer in humans.

On top of the threat of pesticides, almond pollination is uniquely demanding for bees because colonies are aroused from winter dormancy about one to two months earlier than is natural. The sheer quantity of hives required far exceeds that of other crops – apples, America’s second-largest pollination crop, use only one-tenth the number of bees. And the bees are concentrated in one geographic region at the same time, exponentially increasing the risk of spreading sickness.

Top: Dennis Arp replaces queen bees in hives that rejected or were missing them outside Rye. Arp drove to California to purchase the new queens. 

Bottom: Honeybees working for Mountain Top Honey Company.

“Bees are exposed to all kinds of diseases in California,” says Arp. “There can be hundreds of thousands of hives from multiple beekeepers in one staging area. It is like letting your bees go into a singles bar and then they have unprotected sex.”

The almond business has been good to Arp – last February, for instance, he installed 1,500 of his hives in one grower’s orchard at $200 per hive – so he is reluctant to make a direct connection between the constant health challenges with his bees and the time spent every spring in the almond groves. “The bees like working on the almonds,” says Arp. “But it obviously exposes them to risks.”

Now he routinely loses 30% or more of his bees a year, mirroring national statistics. In any other industry, the death of a third of your workforce would cause an international outcry – but this staggering loss is now considered the normal cost of doing business.

“The bees in the almond groves are being exploited and disrespected,” says Patrick Pynes, an organic beekeeper who teaches environmental studies at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. “They are in severe decline because our human relationship to them has become so destructive.”

The high price of growth

When the phenomenon called colony collapse disorder was first identified in 2006, after a record number of honeybees mysteriously disappeared or died outside their hives, it was linked to a variety of factors including loss of habitat and climate change. But the primary culprit was pesticides. Researchers found that a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids was especially lethal to bees.

A smoker deters bees while Adam and Dennis Arp work on the hives. Photograph: Caitlin O’Hara/The Guardian

Last May, the EPA pulled a dozen “neonics” from the market following a successful lawsuit brought by beekeepers and environmental groups. 

But there are many chemicals that are not labeled as bee toxic, even though they can make bees sick and weaken their immune systems. While bees may survive the pollination season, they may not last the winter or may take back substances that gradually poison the entire colony.

Those on the almond growers’ side acknowledge there is a huge problem. “The bee mortality rate is too high and is unacceptable,” says the entomologist Bob Curtis, a pollination consultant for the Almond Board of California. “It is only because of the hard work and creativity of beekeepers that [almond growers] have gotten the bees they need.”

The almond board’s “best practice” guidelines encourage beekeepers to spend as little time in California’s Central Valley as possible. Honeybees can travel up to three miles in search of varied forage, so even if the almond grower is doing everything right to protect a pollination investment, the cotton or grape farmer down the road may be spraying bee-toxic chemicals on crops.

Even as almond production has steadily ramped up for decades, the number of commercial hives in the US has remained at a steady 2.7m colonies since the early 2000s. With all the challenges beekeepers face, just maintaining the bare minimum is a struggle.

One coping strategy pursued by the almond industry has been to develop genetically modified almond varieties that require only one hive per acre to pollinate, instead of two. And last January, a pollinator protection law went into effect in California as part of the state’s “Bee Where” initiative. For this program, beekeepers are required to register the location of their hives with the county’s agricultural commissioner and farmers must notify the commissioner in advance of any plans to spray pesticides.

Even so, the costs beekeepers incur trying to keep their bees alive are constantly rising. Arp has spent approximately $50,000 in the past year buying new hives to compensate for the 35% colony loss he experienced last year. He also spends at least $50,000 a year on mite treatments, not to mention other more aggressive measures the industry is taking just to maintain the status quo. These include splitting robust hives in half, introducing mail-order queens to new hives and fattening bees on corn syrup or on simulated pollen substances called “pollen patties”.

Experts say that simply working around the pesticide problem isn’t enough and that farming itself must be changed from the ground up.

The search for a solution

Hope is being found in a new certification program that, similar to “organic” or “free trade” labels, will help consumers choose products that have been made with bee-friendly methods.

The “Bee Better” certification program, launched in 2017 by the not-for-profit Xerces Society, introduces biodiversity into almond groves to naturally control pests and nourish honey bees. Xerces is working with almond growers to plant California wildflowers, mustard and clover in between the rows of trees and native flowering hedges along the perimeter of the orchard – a kind of eco-friendly fence to keep bees in the orchard.

The program scored a victory when Häagen-Dazs ice cream became the first food company to carry products with the Bee Better seal. The company’s bee-friendly vanilla milk chocolate almond bar was rolled out in December at Costco, Sam’s Club and BJ’s Wholesale Club, with three more bee-friendly almond ice cream flavors to be available in early 2020.

Letting nature take its course is nothing new for 81-year old Glenn Anderson. He is the first and still one of the few organic almond growers in California’s San Joaquin Valley. His 40-year-old orchard is small – just 20 acres – and has always been chemical free.

“We don’t have pests; we have biodiversity,” says Anderson, who primarily sells directly to individual customers through his Anderson Almonds company. 

Unlike large industrial almond farms that strip the orchard ground bare to more efficiently treat for insects and fungi, Anderson allows a rich understory to grow, which naturally nourishes the soil and strengthens the trees.

Anderson hires a “beekeeper hobbyist” from northern California every spring to install about 20 hives in his orchard. “We have the opposite of colony collapse at my farm,” says Anderson. “My beekeeper brings weak hives down that he wants to recharge on my property.”

Anderson says the tradeoff for not using pesticides is that his annual crop yield is lower – typically about 10,000 pounds – and he keeps his orchard small in order to manage its wildness. “I’m averse to an expansion model,” he says. “It doesn’t suit me much.”

And as for industrial-grown almonds? “They taste like cardboard,” he says.

Back in Arizona, Dennis Arp and his son Adam are just trying to make it through the next few months with as many healthy bees as possible.

There are days when the costs seem overwhelming, and Arp wonders if he should hang up his honey-stained bee suit. But beekeeping is what he knows best, and he wants to pass the business on to his son.

“I don’t know how we will pull it off yet,” he says. “But we will make it work.”

(Source: The Guardian)

Morgan Freeman converted his 124-acre ranch into a giant honeybee sanctuary to save the bees

Morgan Freeman, the actor, film director and philanthropist has added a new title to his name: Beekeeper. The 81-year-old celebrity decided to convert his 124-acre Mississippi ranch into a bee sanctuary.

Freeman's foray into beekeeping began in 2014, where he discussed his new hobby with Jimmy Fallon during The Tonight Show. Freeman had taken up beekeeping just a couple of weeks before appearing on the show and talked about his experience keeping bees and the need to preserve and save wild bees for healthy environments.

As part of his interview, Freeman talked a bit about the motivation as to why he began beekeeping. "There is a concerted effort for bringing bees back onto the planet…We do not realize that they are the foundation, I think, of the growth of the planet, the vegetation..."


Freeman imported 26 bee hives from Arkansas to his ranch in Mississippi. There, Freeman works to feed the bees sugar and water and has help planting bee-friendly magnolia trees, lavender, clover, etc.

Freeman added that he never wears a bee suit or a bee hat and they haven't stung him yet. He only feeds them and has no intention of harvesting honey or disrupting the beehives.

The EPA has highlighted Colony Collapse Disorder as a primary cause for the decline of bees over the last five years. The continued decline of bee colonies can lead to a number of ecological and agricultural issues as bees play the role of a key pollinator for plants.

Last fall, the Trump Administration rolled back bans on the use of bee-killing pesticides. The ban prevented the use of neonicotinoid pesticides (neonics), which have been linked to declining wild bee populations around the world. The combination of these pesticides and insect resistant GMO crops have led to widespread deaths of bee colonies.

Research, published in the journal Science, links the declining bee populations to a combination of parasites, pesticides and habitat loss. While there is no evidence that bees are going to become extinct anytime soon, the decline of bee populations will continue to have ripple effects on wild vegetation and agricultural crops around the world.

(Source: Forbes)

Holland covers hundreds of bus stops with plants as gift to honeybees

Shelters support biodiversity while also capturing dust to improve air quality and storing rainwater

The roofs of hundreds of bus stops have been covered in plants as a gift to honeybee, by a city in the Netherlands.

Mainly made up of sedum plants, a total of 316 have been covered in greenery in Utrecht.

The shelters not only support the city’s biodiversity, such as honey bees and bumblebees, but they also help capture fine dust and store rainwater.

The roofs are looked after by workers who drive around in electric vehicles, and the bus stops have all been fitted with energy-efficient LED lights and bamboo benches.

They are just one of a number of measures Utrecht has introduced in a bid to improve air quality.

The city aims to introduce 55 new electric buses by the end of the year and have “completely clean public transport” by 2028.

The electricity used to power the buses will come directly from Dutch windmills.

Utrecht also runs a scheme which allows residents to apply for funding to transform their own roofs into green roofs.

(Source: The Independent)

David Attenborough urges everyone to leave a spoonful of sugar and water in their garden to save humanity

You don’t have to be a tree hugger to respect the environment that you live in.

For two million years, before the agricultural revolution, humans foraged the land and brought thousands of species of animals to extinction.

We can say that millions of years ago we didn’t know better, but now we do.

Bees are pollinators, and without them, we wouldn’t be alive. They are responsible for feeding 90% of the world’s population.

David Attenborough, the voice behind The Blue Planet and Planet Earth, warns “if bees were to disappear from the face of the Earth, humans would have just four years to live.”

That may become a reality at the rate things are going.

In a heartfelt Instagram post, the 92-year-old documentary maker shared that “in the last five years, the bee population has dropped by 1/3.”

There is a way to make a difference.

David Attenborough says by leaving a teaspoon of sugar and water in your garden or lawn, you can help to re-hydrate them when they’re tired.

“This time of year bees can often look like they are dying or dead, however, they’re far from it. Bees can become tired and they simply don’t have enough energy to return to the hive which can often result in being swept away. If you find a tired bee in your home, a simple solution of sugar and water will help revive an exhausted bee. Simply mix two tablespoons of white, granulated sugar with one tablespoon of water, and place on a spoon for the bee to reach.”

In turn, these bees are going to give you health and happiness!


(Source: Newsroom 24)

France becomes first country in Europe to ban all five pesticides killing bees

France will take a radical step towards protecting its dwindling bee population on Saturday by becoming the first country in Europe to ban all five pesticides researchers believe are killing off the insects.

The move to ban the five so-called neonicotinoids has been hailed by beekeepers and environmentalists, but cereal and sugar beet farmers warn it could leave them all but defenceless in protecting valuable crops against other harmful insects.

By enforcing the blanket ban, France is going further than the European Union, which voted to outlaw the use of three neonicotinoids - clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam - in crop fields starting on December 19.

France has banned these three, along with thiacloprid and acetamiprid, not only outdoors but in greenhouses too.

Initially opposed, Britain now backs the less comprehensive EU ban due to evidence supporting claims the chemicals contribute to “colony collapse disorder”, a mysterious phenomenon that has seen bee populations plummet by up to 90 per cent in some cases. Other potential causes are mites, viruses and fungi.

Introduced in the mid-1990s, synthetic neonicotinoids share the chemical structure of nicotine and attack the central nervous system of insects. Intended to replace older, more harmful pesticides, they are now the most widely used to treat flowering crops, such as fruit trees, beets and vineyards.

But scientific studies have shown that neonicotinoids cut bees’ sperm count and scramble their memory and homing skills. Fresh research out this week even suggests the bees can develop a dangerous addiction to the insecticides, much like smokers for nicotine.

Some French farmers are angry, however, and say there is not enough evidence that neonicotinoids are responsible for bee decline.

Farmers faced a “dramatic technical dead-end," said France’s biggest farming union FNSEA, calling for exemptions in sectors "where there are no alternatives or insufficient ones”.

The ban "will exacerbate unfair competition with European and non-European producers" still allowed to use the pesticides, they warned.

A report by France's ANSES public health agency said in May there were "sufficiently effective, and operational" alternatives to the majority of neonicotinoids used in France.

Others believe the ban should go further.

“There are pesticides all over the place,” Fabien Van Hoecke, a beekeeper in Saint-Aloué in Brittany, who lost 86 per cent of his bees over the winter. While the ban was “a good thing, it won’t save us,” he told AFP, predicting that as soon as they are withdrawn, they will be “replaced by others”.

Despite campaigns to reduce pesticides, France increased their use by 12 per cent between 2014 and 2016.

An upcoming French food safety bill, if adopted, will widen the ban to all chemical substances that act in the same way.

The United Nations warned last year that 40 per cent of invertebrate pollinators - particularly bees and butterflies - risk global extinction.

(Source: Telegraph)