Killer Bees Causing A Buzz

From snakes, to ghosts... to bees on a plane. Killer bees are a very real problem at Tucson International Airport, where officials report the insects have very specific tastes.

"For whatever reason, they seem to like the smell of jet fuel, and especially the yellow color of the Southwest airplane," said Judy Alexander, senior director of operations at the airport, to the Wall Street Journal.

But the stinging creatures can be a problem for all pilots... especially with airplanes that have been recently cleaned with lemon-scented cleaning products, which also attracts the buzzy, and potentially dangerous, nuisances.

To combat the problem, the airport installed scent traps that emit a bee-attracting pheromone. They seemed to help, but that in and of itself is somewhat disturbing... as officials report the traps capture between 60 and 80 swarms every year.

Did you just shudder, too?

http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?ContentBlockID=b3974d48-b4e0-406f-8e0e-e6605130ad9d

History And Art Of Beekeeping

History
The benefits of honey have been known to mankind since the earliest civilizations, as is evident from beekeeping rock paintings that date back to around 13,000 BC. Beekeeping was highly advanced in Egypt and in Rome at that time. It wasn’t until the 19th century, however, that this form of honey production was made popular in America by Amos Root.

Beekeeping is also known as apiculture, a beekeeper is also called an apiarist, and an apiary is where the bees are kept. The basic purpose of beekeeping is to collect honey and beeswax, but it is also used to pollinate crops and generate bees to sell to other beekeepers.

Honeybees were imported from Europe by the colonists of America, Australia and New Zealand, as they were ideal for honey and for use as pollinators. The earliest imported species were the dark bees. Later, the Italian bees, carniolan bees and Caucasian bees were imported. In 1990, Russian honey bees (which are extremely resistant to bee parasites) were imported into the U.S.

Before the 1980s, beekeeping was mostly carried out in America by hobby beekeepers with age-old technology. However, with the arrival of dangerous parasites like the tracheal mites in the 1980s and the varroa mites and small hive mites in the 1990s, these traditional beekeepers found it difficult to prevent the bees from dying, as they did not have the techniques to tackle these parasites.

Local beekeepers of Asia use other species of Apis for honey and beeswax. In Australia and Central America, non-Apis species of honeybees, also known as stingless bees, are still being used.

Art of beekeeping
Beekeepers use a box, known as a hive, to house a colony of bees. A colony consists of a single queen bee, many infertile worker bees, and drones, the male bees. The hive also houses the brood, which consists of eggs, larvae and pupae.

During the spring and summer months when there is good weather and plenty of forage available, provisions such as nectar and pollen are amassed in the colony of bees to allow for reproduction and survival in the winter .

To achieve a maximum harvest, it is essential that the population of the colony is high – between 30,000 and 60,000, depending upon the amount of forage available. In the winter, this population is brought down to about 6,000 so that the consumption of provisions is minimized. The population cannot be reduced much more than this since the bees need to revive the colony in the spring. Moreover, an optimum temperature of 48 degrees Fahrenheit is required for the bees to survive through the winter, and for that a minimum number of bees need to be clustered together in the colony.

Couple says bee swarm kills dogs

Couple says bee swarm kills dogs: "hey said it was a nightmare, something Hitchcock himself might have dreamed up.

'It was like a morgue out here,' said Elyse Giles, of Oro Grande, who said her two dogs and five baby chickens were killed on July 22 when an immense bee swarm descended on her Sunflower Lane home. 'It was horrible — it was like a nightmare.'

Giles said an enormous cloud of bees, with no apparent provocation, hailed down on her home around 4:30 p.m. that Saturday.

'It had been hot, and we'd been keeping the dogs in,' Giles said. 'We decided to let them out because it cooled down. There wasn't a single bee in sight.'

While her husband walked their two pet Chihuahuas into the backyard, she stayed inside.

'I heard my one Chihuahua making the weirdest noises,' she said. 'I never heard him doing anything like that before.'

When she checked on her husband and the two dogs, she found a horrifying scene: 'I saw this huge swarm of bees, and my husband was yelling. They covered him like rain.'

Her husband eventually made it back into the house with one of the dogs, but the older dog — a 15-year-old Chihuahua plagued by blindness — was stuck in the backyard, wandering aimlessly as it was blanketed in bees.

'She was totally covered in bees,' Giles said."

Keepers fear killer bees are swarming

Keepers fear killer bees are swarming:

"Peter Burkard has been keeping bees and selling honey in Manatee County for nearly 27 years, but a few years ago he noticed something different.

'Up until a few years ago, I could go to the hive, take the honey off and not get stung,' said Burkard, who lives just north of Tallevast Avenue and sells his 'I Love You Honey' every Saturday at Sarasota's Farmer's Market.

'Now,' Burkard said. 'Even if I do everything the same, use smoke properly and not make quick movements, I seem to get a couple of stings whenever I go in.'

Burkard doesn't know for sure if his five strong hives have been invaded by the more aggressive African honeybees, also called Killer Bees, but he has his suspicions.

With more than 7,000 honeybee colonies, Manatee County beekeepers are concerned about the invasion of Africanized bees that started showing up in Tampa Bay a year ago.

But they just aren't sure it's really happening.

'Someone told me that our Manatee County bees are 70 to 80 percent Africanized, but I haven't noticed it,' Palmetto's Gary Ranker, a commercial beekeeper, said. 'I haven't seen any more aggressive behavior.'"