Animal welfare is often and intensely discussed for mammals or poultry. Bees on the other hand, only seldomly are considered in these discussions. This may be because it is hard to define what welfare could be for them. We see if a dog or a cow is not well, they are mammals as we are…
The news bumblebees were suffering from climate change perhaps was not that surprising – bumblebees are the polar bears amongst the bees, they usually prefer cool temperatures. But the extent of the impact and how quick the distribution range of bumblebees is changing is nonetheless scary. In one of the press releases related to the…
Reading about a healthy and persistent wild bee population in the USA resisting also varroa infestation made me think of the original host of the varroa mite, the Eastern honeybee Apis cerana. For my PhD, I studied the fertility regulation of Varroa destructor. As the mites do not reproduce in the worker brood of their…
My “bee career” began with bumblebees. It was in a course of evolutionary ecology at the university; together with another student I observed different bumblebee species on different flowers in the garden of the faculty. We noticed that some bumblebee species fly on open, more disc-shaped flowers, while other species preferred flowers with long corollas…
When I heard that Bombus dahlbohmii is near to extinction at the EurBee conference in Murcia last September, I was shocked. It was just a small part of Dave Goulson’s plenary talk the first day of the conference, only a comment before coming to the main argument, the impact of pesticides on bumblebees. For me…
When Heraclitus wrote about nature, he obviously had other concepts than nowadays. But the constancy of change has been noted from many after him: also Darwin wrote “Nothing is more constant than change” to a friend and introduced the concept into modern biology. In a wider sense, it applies also for this site and BeeSafe….
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