As crime sagas go, a scheme rigged by a sophisticated cartel of global traders has all the right blockbuster elements: clandestine movements of illegal substances through a network of co-operatives in Asia, a German conglomerate, jet-setting executives, doctored laboratory reports, high-profile takedowns and fearful turncoats.
What makes this worldwide drama unusual, other than being regarded as part of the largest food fraud in U.S. history, is the fact that honey, nature’s benign golden sweetener, is the lucrative contraband.
What consumers don’t know is that honey doesn’t usually come straight – or pure – from the hive. Most honey comes from China, where beekeepers are notorious for keeping their bees healthy with antibiotics banned in North America because they seep into honey and contaminate it; packers there learn to mask the acrid notes of poor quality product by mixing in sugar or corn-based syrups to fake good taste.
None of this is on the label. Rarely will a jar of honey say “Made in China.” Instead, Chinese honey sold in North America is more likely to be stamped as Indonesian, Malaysian or Taiwanese, due to a growing multimillion dollar laundering system designed to keep the endless supply of cheap and often contaminated Chinese honey moving into the U.S., where tariffs have been implemented to staunch the flow and protect its own struggling industry.
Continue to read this fascinating story ...
Researchers studying the decline of the bumblebee have trained a dog to sniff out the insects in the wild.
Toby, a three-year-old Springer spaniel, can find the bees' nests, hidden in dense undergrowth or in the ground, using only his nose.
Experts at the University of Stirling said that studying the threatened bees was made much harder because of the difficulty in tracking them down.
The three-year project involving Toby is the first of its kind.
Prof Dave Goulson, who will oversee the work of Toby, said that his involvement would give a huge boost to conservation efforts.
He said that of the UK's 25 varieties of bumblebee, three had become extinct and several others were in danger of going the same way because researchers knew very little about how they lived and what was destroying them.
Source:
BBC(via
The Poodle (and Dog) Blog)
In a good year, David Hackenberg can make a $100,000 profit from beekeeping, but this past year has been a financial disaster. And it all began one afternoon last November when he checked on some of his hives in Florida.
"When I pulled into a bee yard in Florida, there was 400 hives of bees that three weeks before that looked great. And all of a sudden, here we got roughly 400 beehives that are totally empty," he recalls.
The bees were gone, and Hackenberg says he doesn’t know where they went. "I mean, I literally got down and crawled around. I mean, seriously, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled around. And there's no dead bees. There are no dead bees anywhere. I mean, you can't find any bees. They flew off someplace," he recalls.
The bees, Hackenberg says, never came back. It's something he says he'd never seen before
. . .
Honey bees can smother their enemies to death by swarming them, researchers report.
The discovery means that bees have three ways of dispatching their enemies: by stinging, which for a bee means suicide; by raising the other creature's body temperature, or thermo-balling; and by asphyxiation.
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via)
The owner of a holiday cabin near Bergen had to call for help after an estimated 100,000 bees took over his property.
A bee expert had to tear through the walls of this cabin in western Norway, to remove the thousands of bees that had moved in.
Archaeologists digging in northern Israel have discovered evidence of a 3,000-year-old beekeeping industry, including remnants of ancient honeycombs, beeswax and what they believe are the oldest intact beehives ever found.
The findings in the ruins of the city of Rehov this summer include 30 intact hives dating to around 900 B.C.
The beehives, made of straw and unbaked clay, have a hole at one end to allow the bees in and out and a lid on the other end to allow beekeepers access to the honeycombs inside. They were found in orderly rows, three high, in a room that could have accommodated around 100 hives.
Some very unusual facts are listed. The most strange, "On the April 1984 Challenger flight, 3,300 bees, housed in a special but confining box, adapted perfectly to zero gravity and built a nearly normal comb. But they didn’t go to the toilet. Since bees excrete only outside the hive, they held it in for seven days. A NASA spokesperson said the space hive was “just as clean as a pin.”"
So Far Nobody Can Explain The Disappearance Of One Quarter Of The Population, But Theories AboundThe answer to what happened to America's vanishing honeybees is simple, a caller told entomologist May Berenbaum: Bee rapture. They were called away to heaven.
No, wait, it is Earth's magnetic field, another caller told the University of Illinois professor.
And when Berenbaum went on the Internet, she found a parody news site that quoted her as blaming rapper Kevin Federline, Britney Spears' ex-husband, and his concerts for the disappearance of the bees. Berenbaum loved it.
The sudden disappearance of one-quarter of America's honeybees has brought out some strange ideas and downright myths.
A swarm of bees clustered outside the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Medical Center shut down the emergency room Monday, as officials waited for a beekeeper to come vacuum up the 7,000 insects.
Although no one was stung, the Little Rock emergency room still decided to be closed for ambulance traffic.
"We'll take walk-ins, but ambulances are being diverted to other hospitals," UAMS spokeswoman Andrea Peel said.
Doctors did not see any patients with bee stings, but emergency room physician Dr. Delaney Kinchen said it was an important precaution to close the ER while clearing out the bees.
"I've been stung thousands of times and never had any problems, but I know people who've been stung twice and almost died," he said.
Beekeeper Harvey Johnston arrived Monday afternoon to remove the beehive.
As crime sagas go, a scheme rigged by a sophisticated cartel of global traders has all the right blockbuster elements: clandestine movements of illegal substances through a network of co-operatives in Asia, a German conglomerate, jet-setting executives, doctored laboratory reports, high-profile takedowns and fearful turncoats.