This weekend, there was a massive swarm of honeybees on the NJ Turnpike near Cherry Hill. It’s believed that the bee onslaught was a result of a beekeeper’s beehive falling beside the highway.

In other not-really-news, this past weekend I briefly attended the Siren Festival in Coney Island,  where I caught a few Malkmus tunes, breathed some sea air, and got a Siren Festival t-shirt featuring a giant squid and a subway car! I also did some more bee watching. Plus, I gained new insight as to why my local Key Food is so completely, utterly insane: I overheard the manager tersely tell an older gentleman who was asking if the store carried an item advertised in a coupon that NO, they didn’t have any and he would not go look in the stock room, TOO BAD. The same manager then told a cashier that people who “stole $.25 bags of popcorn” were “going to go to hell” (the un-labeled, small bags of popcorn were near the cash registers and looked like free samples). I also finally managed to get some much-needed hardware and software so that I could play music from my laptop wirelessly through my stereo speakers; my life is now 1000% more awesome as a result of this.

Tags: Brooklyn, Totally random, Music, Bees by janine
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This video was posted by the Haagen-Dazs “Help the Honeybees”  campaign. It’s especially appropriate since bees do in fact do a dance - known as the “waggle dance” - to tell the other bees where to find the best nectar. Although, not to quibble, but I think it would usually be females (worker bees) rather than males (drones) doing this.

Tags: Bees by janine
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There was an excellent article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal about hobbyist beekeepers. The number of “beekeeping hobbyists has risen by about 10% to 100,000 in the past year or so” as people become more aware of colony collapse disorder and breed bees to try to help the honeybee population. Yet many towns have, or are enacting, ordinances that limit backyard beekeeping. In some instances, backyard beekeepers must have a certain amount of land, or buy a permit, or put up tall fences to discourage the bees from popping over to the neighbors’ place. Yet beekeepers like Omid Ghayeb, who was forced by his town in Maine to move his bees to a more rural area, prevail. He said, “I’m not going to take up golfing instead. We need more bees.”

In other bee-related news, there is also new evidence that bumblebees may be in decline as well:

Evidence for decline in eastern North American bumblebees (Hymenoptera: Apidae), with special focus on Bombus affinis Cresson

Sheile R. Colla and Laurence Packer
Biodiversity and Conservation Volume 17, Number 6/ June, 2008

Abstract  Bumblebees (Bombus spp.) have been declining rapidly in many temperate regions of the Old World. Despite their ecological and economic importance as pollinators, North American bumblebees have not been extensively surveyed and their conservation status is largely unknown. In this study, two approaches were used to determine whether bumblebees in that region were in decline spatially and temporally. First, surveys performed in 2004–2006 in southern Ontario were compared to surveys from 1971 to 1973 in the same sites to look at changes in community composition, in one of the most bumblebee diverse areas of eastern North America. Second, the extent of range decline for a focal species (Bombus affinis Cresson) was estimated by surveying 43 sites throughout its known native range in eastern Canada and the United States. Our study documents an impoverishment of the bumblebee community in southern Ontario over the past 35 years. Bombus affinis in particular was found to have declined drastically in abundance not only in southern Ontario but throughout its native range. The loss of any bumblebee species may result in cascading impacts on native fauna and flora and reduce agricultural production. Implications for the conservation of this important group of pollinators are discussed.

Tags: Bees by janine
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Last night, I went to go see an outdoor movie at the Brooklyn Bridge Park. Since there were 4,000 people there (literally, that is the figure that was announced, I am not just making that up. Also, note: 4,000 people and four toilets), I was shoulder to shoulder with my neighbors. I certainly wasn’t eavesdropping on purpose, but I could smell the man next to me’s armpits so I could certainly hear what he was saying. He and what seemed to be his first date (aww) were talking about insects, and somehow they got on the topic of bees and how bees mate. “Is there a female?” the woman asked. “There’s a queen,” the man said. I poked my husband and whispered “OH MY GOD they are talking about bees and how they mate! I know all about how bees mate! I am dying to tell them.” My husband, having been told by me in the past how bees mate, said “Don’t you dare start talking to those people about how the drone’s penis snaps off and he dies! That is not first date material.” He had a point, so I kept my mouth shut.

Today, however, I was doing some more bee watching in the lovely Cobble Hill Park, observing some bees amongst flowers, when a couple nearby started remarking on how many bees they saw and wondering what types of bees there were. Naturally, since I knew precisely how many and what kinds of bees were around, I piped up this time. “Oh, I am actually collecting bee data,” I told them. They were  interested in learning more about the project (I swear! Really!!), so I told them about it and encouraged them to collect bee data as well for the Bee Watchers. A few minutes later, a woman came over (seeing me standing in front of the flowers with paper and pencil) and asked me I was trying to identify plants. “I’m bee watching,” I explained, and told her about the program too. It turns out she was one of the people responsible for planting the flowers, so we talked about that for a while.

PS. For the 4 of you who read this blog… I am thinking about posting some longer, humorous essays (not related to bees). Thoughts? Comments?

Tags: Brooklyn, Bees by janine
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