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Archive for October, 2007

The End of a Bee’s Life

Posted in Bee Law, Bee Lore, Bee Present, Bee-ology, Beekeeping, Beetwixt & Beetween on October 19, 2007| Leave a Comment »

“Most of the bees come to their end in the open fields. With wings frayed from the winds the summer workers reach the limit of their strength and expire.  Bees that die within the hive are carried outside by the workers – yet this is a rare occurrence.  As many observers have reported, dying bees will use their last remaining strength to creep beyond the landing board.  A Law of the insect city apparently leads the exhausted bees to leave the interior of the hive and so save their fellow workers the task of removing their bodies.  The queen seems to be guided by the same instinct, leaving the hive when her end is near.  For cleanliness is one of the unwritten laws of the insect city. It is inherent in the bees. ”

From: ‘The Golden Throng’ by Edwin Way Teale – republished by Alpha Books of Dorset in 1968.

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What a Relief!

Posted in Bee Present, Bylaugh on October 19, 2007| 1 Comment »

Mum came out of the house just at that moment.  We shared the excitement with her.  “Look!” I said “What do you think it is?”  “It is a swarm of bees!” Mum said. Bees!  There was a scientific explanation for all those mysterious happenings.  And it lay in the fact that all these strange things that had happened in the past few minutes had been caused by this large ball of buzzing bees.  What a relief!

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Bee Afraid, Bee Very Afraid!

Posted in Bee Lore, Bee Present, Beekeeping on October 19, 2007| 1 Comment »

They’ve built barriers, shone flashlights and even burned their rubber-soled shoes.  yet try as they might, African farmers struggle to keep elephants from trampling their land and destroying their crops.

The answer, finally, may be found in the sound of a swarm of buzzing bees.  “They really bolted,” says Lucy King at the University of Oxford, whose team played 4-minute recordings of bees to 17 herds of elephants in the Buffalo Springs and Samburo national reserves in Kenya.  “One herd even ran across a river to get away.”

King successfully deterred 16 of the 17 herds by playing them recordings from speakers hidden in a portable fake tree trunk.  Some herds put more than 100 metres between them and the buzz.  The average “safe” distance for the elephants was 64 metres, compared with just 20 metres to avoid white noise (Current Biology, vol 17, p R832).

King decided to act after hearing that elephants avoid trees containing beehives.  One game warden told her of seeing a large bull elephant being stung up its trunk.  “It went completely beserk, apparently,” she says.

Although the recordings work well, the equipment needed to play it is expensive.  King believes a cheaper, more sustainable solution is to use real beehives, with the honey they supply providing additional food and income for farmers.  She is conducting field trials using real hives to discover what effect they have on elephants, and just how sweet the benefits are for farmers.

From: New Scientist, 13 October 2007, page5

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