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

In European heraldry, a symbolic reference such as a bee, castle, drawbridge or wheatsheaf is known as a “cant”. Cants invariably have centuries of cultural significance and/or more than a bit of baggage. In the arms of Napoleon III, for example, (think Les Misérables*), there are figurative hives of bees, a desperate invocation of his

Did you know that bees navigate using both visual markers and a “compass” of iron compounds in their bodies (that reacts to the orientation Earth’s magnetic field). Amazingly, they measure distance too by charting their own energy expenditure. They convey all of this information to their sisters back home using the famously intricate ‘waggle dance’

Every year, before the weather turns warm enough for beekeeping to be on the agenda, the arrival of baby lambs takes priority. The ewes belong to another family member and have their lambs undercover on Penlan Farm, not far from the Quarry Field in fact. Although it is dry in the lambing sheds, the weather

 Martin Giurfa is a Professor at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition, Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France. He recently published an article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that suggests that bees are more like us than you might think. “It has already been shown that bees are able to

On Friday, a London judge refused to support a Trading Standards complaint against a beekeeper on the sticky question of what constitutes “Raw Honey”. The judge poetically referenced Winnie the Pooh in his summing up, quoting Piglet’s truism that “the things that make me different are the things that make me me’. (LBWF v Odysea

Although it is only possible to identify the plants that honey comes from with a microscope or a DNA analysis, watching the bees is a habitual and pleasurable pastime. Most pollen comes in distinct colours that can be checked against Farrow & Ball type colour charts. There are few things that beekeepers like more in