Just when you thought all the bees disappeared and humanity was headed toward a pollen-less future where no crops could be grown, the little buggers are swarming all over Manhattan: 15,000 just visited Chinatown.
Pharming — genetic engineering of crops to produce drugs of all sorts — is real and weedmatos are possible, yet, before you play green Frankenstein in your community garden, beware the bee police! London already employs hives of narcs for surveillance and Thomas Thwaites’s Policing Genes project (part of London’s “High Society” drug culture retrospective) will tell you how. Read more »
Well, cherry technically. Red Dye No. 40 to be exact. That’s what a state agriculture specialist told Brooklyn beekeepers who became concerned when the honey their bees were producing had a reddish color that tasted really bad. Turns out the little buzzers were gorging on cocktail cherries from the Dell Maraschino Cherries Company factory in RED Hook, of all places.
Honey bee extinction is getting worse. Now, there’s a microbe that causes colony collapse disorder, “the mysterious phenomenon characterized by adult bees abandoning the hive.” If that’s a symptom of our collapsing ecosystem, that’s scary. But don’t panic. One way to cope with our impeding doom is trying to save bees with design. Read more »
Unlike mosquitoes and bedbugs which have come to destroy humanity, bees are one of those insects that help keep us alive, but guess what? Bee pollination is way down and that’s not good.
Beekeepers throughout the city may soon be able to crawl out from under their shadowy honey lairs and raise bees legally. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is considering a measure that would “allow residents to keep hives of Apis mellifera, the common, nonaggressive honeybee,” reports the New York Times. Officials say the change of heart stems from studies that show a low incidence of bee stings and no real danger to the public.
Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images
Thousands of sting-happy bees swarmed car accident victims and emergency workers after a van carrying the hives crashed in Turkey. Two passengers were trapped inside the vehicle with the attacking insects for over an hour as rescue personnel also battled back the bees trying to reach them. An 18-year-old died of complications from the crash and multiple bee stings and another 20 were injured. Officials said the bees had completed covered the faces of both the victims, Candyman-style, turning this car accident into a nightmarish disaster more suited for horror movies than real life scenarios. Video below. Read more »
Inner city beekeepers are sick of being forced into the shadows because of their illegal craft and over a dozen of the amateur honey producers swarmed City Hall yesterday to call for the legalization of beekeeping within the five boroughs. One of the outlaws noted that even the White House has a hive. |AP|
The New York Times went deep cover and delved into the sunny underworld of lawless bee keeping. Currently, it’s illegal to keep hives in the city, but that’s not stopping people from engaging in the outlaw activity, particularly in Brooklyn. |NYT|
Oxford University scientists, who may or may not have been high at the time, discovered a new way to thwart crop-raiding elephants in Kenya: beehive fences! The log beehives are strung together along a wire fence and when the elephants attempt to push past it, swarms of pissed-off bees are unleashed, causing the massive mammals to retreat like little bitches. |ScienceDaily|
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