New research on honey bee deaths

There's a new piece of research just been released, which is based on an analysis of the honey bee generome. Scientists have compared the generome from healthy bees and bees affected by colony collapse syndrome (where whole hives simply collapse and the bees are found dead or dying). See here. There some interesting findings.

Honey bees and the health problems they face

The Barefoot Beekeeper: Towards More Natural Beekeeping

I thought I'd include a link to this article about bees and the problems they face because of our exploitation of them and the degraded environment we've forced them to live in.

This bee is infected with the varoa mite, a mite that lives on the bees. Whilst the varoa mite has been around for practically as long as bees, they're not able to withstand them in the way they used to - and it seems lots of hives are being lost to this mite. Of course it's not the main cause of the problems bees face - the attached article highlights some of the problems.