"Ivy, often maligned as a garden pest, is vital to honey bees and other pollinators seeking food in autumn, new research from the University of Sussex reveals.

The research, carried out by scientists at the University's Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects (LASI) is published online today (26 April 2013) in the journal Insect Conservation and Diversity.


Honey bees returning from successful forage trips perform the waggle dance to tell nest mates where to find nectar and pollen-rich flowers (the dance indicates the direction and distance to the flowers). Researchers video then decode the waggle dances and use the data to find out how far bees fly, where they go to and what types of plants they are feeding on at different times in the year.

The main findings were:

• On average 89 per cent of pollen pellets brought by worker bees to hives were from ivy. There was no difference between hives located in an urban (Brighton) versus a rural area (University of Sussex).
• 80 per cent of honey bees foraging on ivy were collecting nectar not pollen.
• Ivy nectar was high quality, with a lot of sugar (49 per cent).
• Ivy flowers are visited by a wide range of insects, such as late-season butterflies, hover flies, other types of flies, wasps, bumble bees, and the ivy bee (a bee that specialises on ivy). Insects were attracted to ivy flowers in large numbers in both urban and rural areas.
• Ivy is common and available to insects in both town and countryside."

The honey and the ivy: Why gardeners' foe is the bees' friend
by Maggie Clune

"Bees could hold the key to preventing HIV transmission. Researchers have discovered that bee venom kills the virus while leaving body cells unharmed, which could lead to an anti-HIV vaginal gel and other treatments.

Scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that melittin, a toxin found in bee venom, physically destroys the HIV virus, a breakthrough that could potentially lead to drugs that are immune to HIV resistance. The study was published Thursday in the journal Antiviral Therapy.

'Our hope is that in places where HIV is running rampant, people could use this as a preventative measure to stop the initial infection,' Joshua Hood, one of the authors of the study, said in a statement."


Study: Bee Venom Kills HIV
By Jason Koebler

"Honey is more than a sweet treat to bees. It turns out that it doses honeybees with certain compounds that switch on their detox defenses.

Instead of relying on their own honey for food during the winter, today’s commercially kept honeybees often get fed sugar substitutes and protein supplements. The sugar sources such as high-fructose corn syrup may be missing something helpful, however. New tests find compounds in honey that trigger surges of activity in genes needed for detoxifying chemicals or for making antimicrobial agents, researchers report April 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Undisturbed by beekeepers, adult bees would sip flower nectar to keep themselves going and collect pollen to squish into a softened paste to feed to their young. They make honey from extra nectar and store it to eat during tough times without fresh flowers.

In that honey, the most effective trigger for detox genes is p-coumaric acid, reports entomologist May Berenbaum and her colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It’s a building block of the coatings for pollen grains."

Bees need honey's natural pharmaceuticals
By Susan Milius

"Bumblebees may not have the large, highly-developed brains that certain other animals possess – us extremely intelligent primates, for example – but they can perform surprisingly sophisticated tasks, like using logic and picking up cues from their fellow bees.  Scientists at the Zoological Society of London have been examining social learning in bees and they have published their findings in the journal Current Biology.

As part of their experiment, the researchers placed a number of artificial flowers in 'flight arenas'.  Blossoms of one particular color had been baited with nectar.  The scientists then released a group of bees into the arena while another group of bees was placed on one side of a screen so they could observe as their fellow bees collected nectar from the fake flowers.

Later, the observer bees were released into an arena so they could obtain their own nectar.  Bees in the second group repeatedly chose flowers the same color as those they had seen chosen by the first group, unlike a group of 'naïve foragers' – bees who had not watched the first group.

However, bees that been previously trained to associate the popular flower color with quinine (a substance that bees dislike) disregarded their fellow bee’s preference, opting for other flowers instead.  Just an example of how sometimes being smart means following your gut."


Like People, Bees Learn From Watching One Another
by Alyson Foster

  "Bee expert Marla Spivak is concerned about the pesticides known as neonicotinoids, but also about other threats to bees that are much easier to pronounce: Viruses. Mites. Drought.

A recent New York Times article about the alarming decline of bees discussed all of those. But Spivak, a professor in entomology and director of the Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota, homes in on a broader problem: a lack of flowers.

'We really have a flowerless landscape out there, and bees need flowers for good nutrition,' Spivak said Monday on The Daily Circuit. 'If bees have good nutrition, and a lot of pollen and protein coming in and nectar coming in, they're better able to fight off these diseases. And it helps them detoxify some of the pesticides. We really need bee-friendly flowers out there, everywhere.'



"A caller from St. Cloud said she was planning her garden for this year, and asked what seeds she could plant to help the bees in her area. 'Go with the native perennials,' Spivak advised. 'All of those native plants that flower are great for bees.' She listed some by common name:

•Prairie clover.
•Mountain mint.
•Bee balm.
•Milkweeds.
•Late season asters and goldenrods.

Milkweed is also good for monarch butterflies, Spivak said. And 'Honeybees really like clover and alfalfa and buckwheat,' so people with enough land to plant should consider those."


With hives in sharp decline, expert calls for bee-friendly flowers
from: minnesota.publicradio.org

  "Food-safety experts have found that much of the honey sold in the United States isn't actually honey, but a concoction of corn or rice syrup, malt sweeteners or 'jiggery' (cheap, unrefined sugar), plus a small amount of genuine honey, according to Wired UK.

Worse, some honey — much of which is imported from Asia — has been found to contain toxins like lead and other heavy metals, as well as drugs like chloramphenicol, an antibiotic, according to a Department of Justice news release.

And because cheap honey from China was being dumped on the U.S. market at artificially low prices, Chinese honey is now subject to additional import duties. So Chinese exporters simply ship their honey to Thailand or other countries, where it is relabeled to hide its origins, according to NPR.org.

This international 'honey-laundering' scandal has now resulted in a Justice Department indictment of two U.S. companies and the charging of five people with selling mislabeled honey that also contained chloramphenicol.

Honey Solutions of Baytown, Texas, and Groeb Farms of Onsted, Mich., have agreed to pay millions of dollars in fines and implement corporate compliance measures following a lengthy Justice Department investigation.

'This is a huge deal for the industry. This is the first admission by a U.S. packer,' of knowingly importing mislabeled honey, Eric Wenger, chairman of True Source Honey, told NPR. True Source Honey is an industry consortium with an auditing system to guarantee the actual origin of honey.

Honey isn't the only food product subject to impurities and mislabeling. Olive oil is often cut with cheaper oils and sold at premium prices, a practice that's expected to expand as a shortage of the oil (caused by a 2012 drought in southern Europe) hits global markets."


'Honey Laundering' an International Scandal, Experts Say
Marc Lallanilla

  "The electric fields that build up on honey bees as they fly, flutter their wings, or rub body parts together may allow the insects to talk to each other, a new study suggests. Tests show that the electric fields, which can be quite strong, deflect the bees' antennae, which, in turn, provide signals to the brain through specialized organs at their bases.

Scientists have long known that flying insects gain an electrical charge when they buzz around. That charge, typically positive, accumulates as the wings zip through the air—much as electrical charge accumulates on a person shuffling across a carpet. And because an insect's exoskeleton has a waxy surface that acts as an electrical insulator, that charge isn't easily dissipated, even when the insect lands on objects, says Randolf Menzel, a neurobiologist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany...

Now, in a series of lab tests, Menzel and colleagues have studied how honey bees respond to electrical fields. In experiments conducted in small chambers with conductive walls that isolated the bees from external electrical fields, the researchers showed that a small, electrically charged wand brought close to a honey bee can cause its antennae to bend. Other tests, using antennae removed from honey bees, indicated that electrically induced deflections triggered reactions in a group of sensory cells, called the Johnston's organ, located near the base of the antennae. In yet other experiments, honey bees learned that a sugary reward was available when they detected a particular pattern of electrical field.

The team's findings 'are very significant,' says Fred Dyer, a behavioral biologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. 'I hadn't heard about the possibility that honey bees could use electrical fields.'

One of the honey bees' forms of communication is the 'waggle dance.' When the insects have located a dense patch of flowers or a source of water, they skitter across the honeycomb in their hive in a pattern related to the direction of and the distance to the site. Fellow worker bees then take that information and forage accordingly. The biggest mystery about the dance, Dyer says, is which senses the bees use—often in the deep, dark recesses of their hive—to conduct their communication. 'People have proposed a variety of methods: direct contact between bees, air currents from the buzzing of their wings, odors, even vibrations transmitted through the honeycomb itself,' he says.

But the team's new findings introduce yet another mode of communication available to the insects, Dyer says. He notes that the group found that antenna deflections induced by an electrically charged honey bee wing are about 10 times the size of those that would be caused by airflow from the wing fluttering at the same distance—a sign that electrical fields could be an important signal.

'They show that the electrical fields are there and that they're within the range of what the animal can sense,' Dyer says. Their claim of evidence is quite compelling.'"


Bees Buzz Each Other, but Not the Way You Think
by Sid Perkins

"(CBS News) Honey bees have been dying in large numbers in recent years, and there's new evidence of a drastic increase in the death rate. Some experts say the latest population drop poses a threat to our nation's food supply.

According to commercial beekeeper James Doan, 'A third of all our food is pollinated by honey bees.'

Doan makes a living renting out thousands of hives to farmers up and down the East Coast. His bees are part of a crucial lifeblood to U.S. agriculture. Doan said, 'I think people just need to really be aware that bees are so important, not just for honey production, but for pollination in the United States.'

Bees pollinate the majority of our fruit and vegetable supply: from apples and pears to green beans, pumpkins, and squash. And the list goes on.

But something is killing the bees at an increasingly alarming rate. Doan said, 'Every day and you'll look and you'll see 100 to 200 bees dead in front of the hive. Maybe even to the point of 40 to 50,000 bees laying out in the front of the hive, which is not normal.'

U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers say early indications suggest this winter will mark the highest death rate they've ever documented, and consumers could eventually feel the effects.

Doan said, 'Without them you're gonna have higher prices that you're going to pay for fruits and vegetables. And those higher prices are not going to mean better products.'

Bees used to die at a rate of 5 to 10 percent a year. Then, around 2006, that rate more than tripled in a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder. Now, some beekeepers say they're losing up to 50 percent of their hives.

Many blame a class of pesticide called neonicotinoids, or 'neonics.' Doan said, 'They block the nerve endings of the bee, and so the bee is paralyzed and then what happens is they starve to death, so you see the bee shaking, and it's a very horrific way of dying for a bee.'

Doan joined a coalition of beekeepers, environmentalists and consumer groups that recently sued the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to ban these chemicals. The lawsuit claims the 'EPA is well aware of recent studies and reports illustrating the risks to honey bees...but has refused to take any regulatory action.'

'We're finding these chemicals in the beehives,' Doan said. 'We know they're there. We're finding them in the bees. So we know they're killing bees.'"


Deepening honey bee crisis creates worry over food supply
CBS News

"You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but this might not be the case for a honeybee.

Just ask David Hale (’15), a sophomore biology major. Hale has been studying the relationship between brain structure and cognitive function in honeybees since the summer after his freshman year.

He explains that as a honeybee ages, a pair of structures in its brain called mushroom bodies grow larger. Larger mushroom bodies may give older bees an advantage over their younger counterparts when it comes to learning and memorizing new things like the color of certain flowers. In nature, this would help older honeybees remember which flowers have more pollen, making them better foragers for the hive.

Hale went to biology professor and honeybee expert Susan Fahrbach to see if she would help him design a scientific study to investigate the phenomena.

With Fahrbach’s guidance, Hale designed a basic IQ test to see if older bees’ enlarged mushroom bodies make them more adept at associating color with reward.

After collecting bees of different ages and fitting them into a harness fashioned from a drinking straw, Hale exposed his tiny subjects to bursts of blue or green light from a projector to simulate different colored flower patches.

A flash of blue light signaled a sugary reward. A flash of green light signaled no reward. Hale put each bee through 20 trials and then reversed the experiment. His results showed that of the 64 bees that completed the test, older ones proved more capable at associating color with reward. The younger bees, the ones less than 10 days old, weren’t yet ready to learn.

Hale said putting together the experiment under Fahrbach’s guidance was the most challenging aspect of his collegiate career to date. His mentor took an available, yet hands-off approach, which allowed Hale to learn from his own mistakes.

'Instead of telling me what to do, professor Fahrbach told me to think outside of the box and come up with my own solution to the problems at hand,' Hale said."


Bee impressed at ACC Meeting of the Minds
By Will Ferguson