The world’s most dangerous bee is probably the Africanised Honeybee, created in Brazil in the 1950’s. Although intended to produce a benign variant of the European Honeybee acclimated to hotter conditions, the escaped hybrid is feared for their aggression and tendency for mob attacks on perceived threats. At least 1000 people have been killed by […]

Known to Hippocrates of Kos (460 – 370 BC), for whom the Hippocratic Oath is named, and liberally prescribed during the Middle-Ages, a cheap honey and vinegar mixture, called Oxymel, is being re-investigated in the light of increasing anti-bacterial resistance. According to the journal Microbiology, recent work by Erin Connelly, an interdisciplinary researcher at the

Over the weekend, I cut out the beeswax from a score of damaged frames. The waxy wood makes for great firelighters and the wax is worth more than the honey it may have originally contained. Later I moved on to another 50 or so old frames, still in a functional condition, that I wanted to

Bees crash, but flies don’t. In 1963, Austrian entomologist Herbert Heran and a German behavioral scientist, Martin Lindauer, noticed something really very odd. If honeybees fly over a calm lake, the absence of ripples causes them to suddenly lose height and crash into the water. Dead bee. Worse, in an experiment created out to replicate

Potential invasive species with honeybees in their sights don’t just include the dreaded Asian Hornet, sadly there are others. The Small Hive Beetle (Aethina tumida) was first identified as a parasite of bee colonies in their sub-saharan home in the 1940’s. Between then and now, with human help, the SHB has hopped to every continent

Use honey for artificial brains? In 2022, engineers at Washington State University turned to the environmentally safe ingredients in honey to “make components for computer systems that mimic neurons and synapses of the human brain, known as neuromorphic computers”. The engineers created memristors, a device to regulate current, by putting honey processed into a solid

For International Women’s Day. Did you know that the two female phenotypes of honeybee, worker and queen, make up 99% of the population of a hive and that for the cold part of the year it is 100%? Males are created for one purpose, everything else is done by the girls. No glass ceiling in

: Did you know tat honeyees have the ability to keep all four wings still (yes, they have four wings, honest) but still use their flight muscles in idle mode. It’s a bit like a an internal combustion engine running in neutral. With no way for the energy to be used mechanically, these tissues begin

Physically traversing a minefield to deactivate the contents is dangerous and painstaking. One innovation that has clearly saved human life, has been to train bees to associate the smell of explosives with a sweet reward. Trained bees set loose in minefields amass at suspicious points giving mine clearance specialists an invaluable idea of the position

Pre-satnav perambulation. The “Travelling Salesman Problem” or TSP is a long standing logic problem. The TSP calculates the shortest and most efficient routes between two or more necessary stops. Think how Amazon’s algorithms plan the routes of the grey vans. To work this out, a TSP calculation requires a very considerable amount of computing power.

Use honey for artificial brains? In 2022, engineers at Washington State University turned to the environmentally safe ingredients in honey to “make components for computer systems that mimic neurons and synapses of the human brain, known as neuromorphic computers”. The engineers created memristors, a device to regulate current, by putting honey processed into a solid

You might think that all honeybees are the same, but not so. One fascinating sub-species is Apis Mellifera Buckfast, a British bred hybrid that hails from Buckfast Abbey in Devon. The Buckfast bee was the culmination of the life’s work of Brother Adam (born Karl Kehrle in Germany in 1898) who arrived to become a