Is Life Too Hard for Honeybees?

Scientific American has a very interesting section and in-depth reports about honey bees.

 

HARD-WORKING HONEYBEE: A mysterious ailment has been afflicting honeybees, responsible for pollinating many commercial crops.

 

 

In Urban Beekeepers Keep Cities Abuzz with Pollinators . by Katherine Harmon,

Paris, San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago. These cosmopolitan cities hardly conjure up the bucolic image of an ideal home for honeybees. But to millions of busy bees, they’re just that. Whereas large-scale commercial beekeepers are busy trucking hives from state to state to pollinate crops, city-dwellers are learning a thing or two about home-raised honey. Bees are being cultivated on roofs everywhere from the Paris Opera House to Chicago’s City Hall.

In Is Life Too Hard for Honeybees? by Wendy Lyons Sunshine   

Commercial honeybees are tough. They get trucked cross-country to pollinate vast crops, often while fed unnatural diets such as sugar water and soy flour. Their hives are treated with chemicals to deter parasites, and they’re exposed to pesticides and fungicides in the fields where they work and feed.

In Bee and Flower Diversity Decline in Tandem  by  David Biello   

The field scabious is a multipetaled blue–sometimes purple–ball of a flower. It provides sustenance to a host of pollinators, but one bee–the scabious bee, or Andrena hattorfiana–relies exclusively on the plant’s bounty to feed her young. Such specialized matches are common for bees, whose size, shape, range and even breeding schedule can be influenced by the lifestyle of the paired plant. Now a new study shows that such bees and the plants that sustain them are declining in tandem–for reasons unknown.

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