The app, suitable for nearly all smartphones and tablet devices, can be downloaded free from www.healthybeeguide.com. It runs on Apple or Android, on iPhones, iPads, Samsungs and Blackberrys and the full range of smart mobiles.

Seb Owen, Commercial Development Manager at Vita who has led the development of the app, said: “Beekeepers often need information at a moment’s notice in their apiaries, so we devised this app to be used anywhere they can receive a mobile signal.

“We introduced this first-ever honeybee health smartphone app to a small number of beekeepers earlier this spring and the first reactions have been very positive indeed, so we are now ready to go fully live

“The Disease Identification section with its photographs and descriptions is already proving very useful in alerting beekeepers to potential problems – and with their smartphone they will even be able to take photographs to compare later or send to fellow beekeepers.”

The main sections of the app cover disease identification and treatment, where to buy treatments, plus sections on the very popular Vita Photo gallery, a beekeeping calendar and links to Vita’s website. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ pages.

To access the free Vita web app from your smartphone, simply use your internet browser to go to www.healthybeeguide.com. The app requires an internet connection, is not available from app stores and will not store information on your phone.

Beekeepers who experience a loss of their livestock, a bee kill, due to misuse of pesticides are helpless: no government or insurance program reimburses their lost livestock.

If a rancher went to his field one morning and discovered 1300 dead cattle or sheep at a value of $179,400 to $195,000 he has legal recourse to even call the Sheriff to help determine who killed his livestock.  Beekeepers can only call the State Agricultural Dept.  That State Ag Dept. may do an investigation, and then again they may not have the funds to do an investigation.  When your business loses $260,000 in livestock, you are now unable to meet your crop pollination contracts, and those 1300 hives will not produce honey this year.  Due to these losses, caused by others through their misuse of pesticides, the beekeeper goes out of business.

The diversity of our food supply relies on pollination by managed, and native bees, and other pollinators.  Yet, bees, and other pollinators continue to suffer the effects of the misuse of pesticides. So far in 2013 bee kills due to pesticide misuse have been experienced in:

• Florida 1000-1500 hives killed; 10,000 to 13,000 severely damaged
• Minnesota 1312 hives experienced death, and severe damage
• New York 300 hives killed
• Utah 200 hives experienced death, and moderate damage in three separate bee yards.

The goal of the regulation of pesticides, and the Congressional enactment of FIFRA is to make sure pesticide poisonings do not happen.  FIFRA section 12(a)(2)(G) and section 2(ee) state that “it shall be unlawful for any person to use any registered pesticide in a manner inconsistent with its labeling.  So, if the label states “do not apply the pesticide when crops are in bloom and bees are actively foraging;” then, applying a pesticide when the plants are blooming, and it is daylight would be a violation of the label.

Let’s celebrate National Pollinator Week through the responsible and legal use of pesticides according to the label.  Let’s celebrate National Pollinator Week by protecting and respecting all agricultural livestock including managed honeybees.  Let’s celebrate National Pollinator Week by supporting native habitat for all pollinators.

The post Livestock losses exceeding $500K appeared first on National Pollinator Defense Fund

Industry Partners To Improve Honey Bee HealthST. LOUIS, June 13, 2013 — A first-of-its-kind Honey Bee Health Summit concluded at Monsanto Company’s Chesterfield Village Research Center. The three-day event hosted by Project Apis m. (PAm) and Monsanto’s Honey Bee Advisory Council (HBAC) included nearly 100 members of the bee community representing academics, beekeepers, industry associations and government sectors.

“There has been a lot of debate about the effectiveness of agri-environment schemes so the results were a bit of a surprise” said co-author David Kleijn. “We don’t know whether the results indicate that agri-environment schemes boost pollinator populations or that they temporarily attract pollinators from surrounding areas. Positive effects were restricted to very common species. However, recently there has been a lot of concern that the decline of pollinators might result in pollination limitation of insect-pollinated crops. Wild bees are excellent pollinators and common species do just the trick. All you have to do to enhance the wild pollinators of crops on farmland is increase flower abundance in field margins roadsides or crop edges.”

The examined agri-environment schemes seem less effective in enhancing endangered pollinator species. Endangered species were rarely observed during the field studies. “Most of the studies used for the analyses were carried out in North-western Europe where farming is relatively intensive. In these areas endangered species are restricted to semi-natural habitats and nature reserves. Also, endangered bee species often specialize on flowers that cannot easily be established on farmland, such as heather or bilberry. The conservation of Red data book pollinators seems to require a separate conservation strategy.”

Rachael Winfree, a leading pollination scientist from Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA comments “This is an interesting, timely and comprehensive study that tests several ecological hypotheses to answer an important question: Where and how should we restore pollinators on agricultural lands? Given the global interest in pollinator declines, and the considerable government funding going into pollinator restorations in the USA and EU, this work will have important policy implications.”

Program: Candidates within a Ph.D. program in any Agriculture, Apiculture or Entomology department in the United States.  The Costco Apis Scholar will be involved in a clearly identifiable and defined sustainable issue.

Qualifications: Candidates must have a B.S. or M.S. degree in a science- or agriculture-related field.  It is preferable the candidate have some working experience with bees. Published papers in apiculture are a plus.  The individual must demonstrate potential for significant achievements in honey bee health science and research.

Financial Support: Three to four years continuous support for graduate education and research will be provided in annual increments up to $50,000.

Application Deadline:  Friday, July 5, 2013, 5 pm PDT.

Contact: To apply, please see our website at www.ProjectApism.org.  For additional information, contact Tara McCall at ProjectApisManager@gmail.com.

Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community donates bees, hives

June 6, 2013 (MINNEAPOLIS) – The green roof at the Minneapolis City Hall and Courthouse building is now buzzing with honeybees, thanks to a donation from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, which donated the bees from its own apiaries. Bees on rooftops are common in cities, and the green roof provides critical, protected habitat – especially in a commercial area such as Downtown. The two hives are expected to grow to about 50,000 bees each.

The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community donated the bees and equipment as part of its commitment to a sustainable environment and to help the City with its environmental goals. The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community’s own beehives have brought benefits including pollination of the fruits and vegetables at the tribe’s Wozupi (garden), honey production, and increased public awareness of the importance of pollinators through Wozupi classes and tours.

The beehive installation promotes awareness of urban ecosystems and furthers City goals including locally grown food available and chosen; and livable communities, healthy lives. It is also intended to serve as an example of urban and rooftop beekeeping since the City recently relaxed its beekeeping rules for rooftop hives.

The bees’ foraging distance is about 28 square miles; from this location that includes ample resources for a flourishing hive such as areas around Lake of the Isles; parts of Lake Calhoun, Cedar Lake and Brownie Lake; about six miles of Mississippi shoreline; extensive parkland including Loring Park; and portions of the University of Minnesota. Honeybees are not aggressive; furthermore, their presence on rooftops is a safe distance from human traffic.

Honeybee populations have been declining because of several factors including loss of habitat, use of pesticides, bee diseases and parasites. Minneapolis is one of many cities around the country promoting beekeeping. From Washington, D.C., to Chicago to San Francisco, municipal governments and beekeeping organizations are working to reverse the trend of disappearing honeybees.

Other donors to this rooftop honeybee project include the Crystal VFW, Kingfield Neighborhood Association, Michelle Borland, Kelly Hamm, Ed Hanlon, John Prest, Leane Slominski, Joyce Thomas and Kristin Troutwine. These donations are for supplies and additional equipment.

Click here for information on beekeeping regulations in Minneapolis. For more information on Minneapolis sustainability efforts, visit www.minneapolismn.gov/sustainability.

The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community Wozupi (garden) manages more than 4.8 million honeybees in 120 hives in six apiaries. The honeybees provide important pollination for the Wozupi fruits and vegetables, and they feed throughout the season on tree blossoms, flowers, and other plants around the Community. The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community is a federally recognized, sovereign Indian tribe located southwest of Minneapolis/St. Paul. With a focus on being a good neighbor, good steward of the earth, and good employer, the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community is committed to community partnerships, charitable donations, a healthy environment, and a strong economy. For more information, visit www.shakopeedakota.org and www.smscwozupi.org.

State-Of-The-Art Facility Will Address Honey Bee Health
Through Collaboration, Education and Research

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. (May 29, 2013) – As part of its continued commitment to honey bee health, today Bayer CropScience broke ground on its North American Bee Care Center, a recognition of the importance of these pollinators to agriculture. Senior company managers, bee health experts and representatives from the community were on hand to begin work on the new facility, approximately a 6,000-square-foot state-of-the-art building which will complement an existing Bee Care Center that was established last year at the company’s global headquarters in Monheim, Germany.

Housed in the Bee Care Center will be a full laboratory and teaching apiary; honey extraction and workshop space; interactive learning center; and meeting, training and presentation facilities for beekeepers, farmers and educators, as well as office space for graduate students. Although the North American Bee Care Center will have its own honey bee colonies for teaching and demonstration purposes, the facility will be supported by other research apiaries, located nearby the Research Triangle Park area, to coordinate and extend research projects directed toward bee health.

The Bee Care Center, a hub to promote worldwide bee health initiatives, will serve to support scientific research and help educate stakeholders and the general public about the importance of honey bees to agriculture by providing pollination of crops that help meet the growing global demand for a nutritious and abundant food supply. In order to address food challenge issues, the Center will bring together significant technological, scientific and academic resources to protect and improve honey bee health and sustainable agriculture.

In its recent comprehensive assessment on honey bee health, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) noted that bees are suffering from a complex set of stressors, including parasites and diseases, lack of genetic diversity, and inadequate nutrition, while stressing the need for collaboration and information sharing among all stakeholders as a critical component in promoting best management practices. The North American Bee Care Center is being created with these goals in mind.

Bayer CropScience is also expanding its Clayton research apiary, known as “Beesboro,” to include an appproximately 1,200-square-foot building with an office, a wintering cold room, extraction area, bee hive maintenance area and storage areas. This facility expected to be operational in late summer 2013.

“At Bayer, we have been committed to bee health for more than 25 years,” said Jim Blome, President and CEO of Bayer CropScience LP. “The Bee Care Center is the latest example of our dedication to sustainable agriculture, and we hope to continue to provide the research necessary to ensure the health of colonies and honey bees around the world. Our scientists are working to help solve some of the most pressing honey bee health problems, as their importance to the global food supply cannot be overstated.”

Additionally, the Bee Care Center will be a highly sustainable facility, which will help Bayer CropScience reduce its carbon footprint in an effort to promote corporate environmental stewardship. For more information on the North American Bee Care Center and Bayer CropScience’s commitment to honeybee health, visit http://www.bayercropscience.us/our-commitment/bee-health.

As you know the Farm Bill is working its way through Congress. What is surprising are the number of amendments (there are now over 300). Some are positive, and others appear problematic. Though not all amendments make it to the final Farm Bill please take time to read the following:

Brett Adee
Board President
National Pollinator Defense Fund

Researchers led by the University of Leeds and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands found evidence of dramatic reductions in the diversity of species in Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands between the 1950s and 1980s.

But the picture brightened markedly after 1990, with a slowdown in local and national biodiversity losses among bees, hoverflies and wild plants.

Professor Bill Kunin, Professor of Ecology at the University of Leeds, said: “Most observers have been saying that the 1992 Rio Earth Summit targets to slow biodiversity loss by 2010 failed, but what we are seeing is a significant slowing or reversal of the declines for wild plants and their insect pollinators.

“These species are important to us. About a third of our food production, including most of our fruit and vegetables, depends on animal pollination and we know that most crop pollination is done by wild pollinators. Biodiversity is important to ensuring we don’t lose that service. Relying on a few species could be risky in a changing environment,” he added.

The study, published in the journal Ecology Letters, found a 30 per cent fall in local bumblebee biodiversity in all three countries between the 1950s and the 1980s. However, that decline slowed to an estimated 10 per cent in Britain by 2010, while in Belgium and the Netherlands bumblebee diversity had stabilized.

The picture was better for other wild bees, with an 8 per cent reduction in diversity in the Netherlands and a stable picture in Great Britain turning into significant increases (7 per cent in the Netherlands and 10 per cent in Britain) over the past 20 years. While these solitary bees continued to decline in Belgium, hoverfly diversity improved there, shifting from stable diversity in the 1980s to significant (20 per cent) increases in recent decades. British wildflower diversity had declined about 20 per cent from the 1950s to the 1980s, but again the declines have ceased in the past 20 years.

Not all groups fared so well. Butterfly diversity continued to fall in all three countries at roughly the same rates as in the past.

Dr Luisa Carvalheiro, lead author on the paper, said: “It is possible that by 1990 the most sensitive species had already gone. However, that’s probably not the whole story, as there are still plenty of rare and vulnerable species present in recent records.

“There is a much more encouraging possibility: the conservation work and agri-environment programs paying farmers to encourage biodiversity may be having an effect. We may also be seeing a slowdown of the drivers of decline. The postwar emphasis on getting land into production and on more intensive farming has given way to a more stable situation in which the rate of landscape change has slowed and in which agrichemical excesses are regulated.

Dr Carvalheiro said: “If what we take from the Rio targets is that the investment in conservation gave us no results, then that is a counsel of despair. This study brings a positive message for conservation. But some important groups are undoubtedly still declining, so continued and increased investment in conservation practices is essential for guaranteeing the persistence of a diverse assemblage of species.”

Co-author Professor Koos Biesmeijer, who works both at the University of Leeds and Naturalis, said: “This paper builds on a widely-publicized study we published in 2006 that established that the diversity of bees and of wildflowers had declined. Our new work is based on a much bigger dataset and improved analytic methods, and it reveals much more detail about the scale and timing of biodiversity losses.

“However, while we can use biodiversity records to measure changes in the diversity of pollinators, we can’t tell what’s happening to their overall abundance or to the quality of the pollination services they provide to wildflowers or agricultural crops. To study these issues would require a long-term monitoring program.”

The research team, including scientists from 18 institutions in Europe and the United States, used historical and contemporary records of species’ presence held by organizations including the European Invertebrate Survey, Butterfly Conservation, the Bees Wasps and Ants Recording Society, the INBO Research Institute for Nature and Forest in Belgium and the University of Mons, Belgium.

The study is published in Ecology Letters on Wednesday, May 22, 2013. This is the 21st anniversary of the signing of the Convention on Biological Diversity and has been designated by the United Nations as International Day for Biological Diversity.

Excerpt:

However, at this time we need an infusion of unrestricted funds to continue our comprehensive research program.  We especially want to fund recent proposals received, including Dr. Reed Johnson’s Dimilin research ($134,640), Maryann Frazier’s pesticide cost share program ($15,000), Dr. Brian Johnson’s IVDS validation work ($34,755), Dr. Jonathan Engelsma’s Hive Scale Network ($22,140), and Dr. David Tarpy’s Nexcelom Vision System to process BIP samples ($29,480).  These projects total $237,000.

We are requesting your help in circulating this letter so that we can obtain the needed funding for these projects.  We have charted a strong course for Project Apis m’s future. Please talk to your contacts about PAm and what PAm is doing for the honey bee industry.

Donations can be made to:
Project Apis m.
P.O. Box 3157
Chico, CA  95927

Or Online:  www.ProjectApism.org.  See “Donate Now” button (Paypal will take 3.2% of these donations).