"Royal Jelly is an amazing substance. It is secreted by the worker honeybees for consumption by the larvae and adults that become the queen bees of the hive. Royal Jelly contains vitamins A, B-complex, C, D and E. It also has the minerals calcium, copper, iron, phosphorous, potassium, silicon and sulfur. Royal Jelly contains a chemical compound called acetylcholine, which is a brain chemical required for the transmission of nerve impulses from one cell to another. Besides a boost in energy, it’s also been purported to help with anxiety, depression, and immunity. It is contraindicated for people with allergies to bees and honey, and those who are asthmatic."


5 Supplements to Help You Find Your Get Up and Go
by Michelle Gordon

"The controversy over possible links between massive bee die-offs and agricultural pesticides has overshadowed another threat: the use of those same pesticides in backyards and gardens.

Neonicotinoid pesticides are ubiquitous in everday consumer plant treatments, and may expose bees to far higher doses than those found on farms, where neonicotinoids used in seed coatings are already considered a major problem by many scientists.

'It’s amazing how much research is out there on seed treatments, and in a way that’s distracted everyone from what may be a bigger problem,' said Mace Vaughan, pollinator program director at the Xerces society, an invertebrate conservation group.



The vast majority of attention paid to neonicotinoids, the world’s most popular class of pesticides, has focused on their agricultural uses and possible effects. A growing body of research suggests that, even at non-lethal doses, the pesticides can disrupt bee navigation and make them vulnerable to disease and stress.

Neonicotinoids are now a leading suspect in colony collapse disorder, a mysterious condition that’s decimating domestic and wild bee colonies across much of North America and Europe. The emergence of colony collapse disorder coincided with a dramatic increase in agricultural neonicotinoid use."


Backyard Pesticide Use May Fuel Bee Die-Off
By Brandon Keim

"Bees on the west side of the state keep on disappearing, and 'zombees' may be to blame. In this case, 'zombees' are a type of fruit fly that are doing tons of damage to the bee population. The phorid fly injects a honey bee with eggs, killing the bee outright. Fortunately, beekeepers on this side of the state have yet to see it.

'The cause of that is the absence of the primary host the bumble bee so it's a significant concern but not for the reason that have been publicized,' said beekeeper and former apiary inspector, Tom Theobald.

While the fly only affects a single bee, the real concern is collapsing colonies. Dying bees means dying agriculture across our area."


"Zombees" to blame for honeybee disappearance?
By Ashly Custer

"Honeybee populations struggle against a variety of environmental factors. 'In the mid-80s, parasitic mites destroyed the wild honey bee population,' said David Tarpy, an associate professor and apiculturalist, or beekeeper, at N.C. State University. Widespread usage of insecticides continue to threaten the domestic population, he said, and colony collapse disorder kills whole hives.

'CCD is a mysterious problem for beekeepers,' Tarpy adds. 'If you see a honeybee, thank a beekeeper.'

Researchers are investigating how the remaining feral bee populations survived, Tarpy said. It’s important that remaining feral bee populations be protected, so that scientists can investigate why the honeybees aren’t healthy, he adds.

To support honeybees and beekeepers, Tarpy outlines three things anyone can do:

— Be conscientious about which insecticides you use in a home garden, because harsh insecticides often kill or weaken honey bees.

— Plant bee-friendly gardens with abundant pollen and nectar sources to support the bee population.

— Become a beekeeper."

The Herald-Sun - Honeybees an endangered 186M industry
By Kinsey Sullivan

"What does the health of bees have to do with the corn crop? A growing weight of evidence links a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which are used on nearly the entire US corn crop, to declining bee health...

Pesticide-treated forager bees brought back significantly less pollen in each forage run, and took significantly longer on each run, than those in the control group...

The reduced worker efficiency had two other 'knock on' effects for overall hive health. The first is that recruiting more foragers to collect pollen is a risky strategy—individual bees can get lost. The treated colonies paid the price—the neonic-only colonies experienced 50 percent more lost workers than the control, and the colonies exposed to both pesticides lost 55 percent more.

The other effect has to do with brooding—raising the next generation of bees for the hive. The treated hives showed significantly lower production of new bees—probably, the researchers suggest, because they had to divert bees from brooding duties to foraging duties, and also because of less overall availability of pollen.

All of these factors, the researchers conclude, lead to colonies that are less resilient to the many stresses that confront bees in the field: loss of habitat, parasites, and viruses. Two of the 40 colonies involved in the study collapsed over its four-week course, both from the hives treated with the combined pesticides. The clear takeaway is that neonic pesticides, both alone and in combination with another pesticide, significantly damage bee health. To grow our massive corn crop, we're killing our bees."


Do Bayer's Pesticides Make Worker Bees Lazy?
—By Tom Philpott