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posted by CoolHand on Friday May 15 2015, @03:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the bee-in-a-bonnet dept.

The bees keep dying:

Beekeepers across the United States lost more than 40 percent of their honey bee colonies during the year spanning April 2014 to April 2015, according to the latest results of an annual nationwide survey. While winter loss rates improved slightly compared to last year, summer losses--and consequently, total annual losses--were more severe. Commercial beekeepers were hit particularly hard by the high rate of summer losses, which outstripped winter losses for the first time in five years, stoking concerns over the long-term trend of poor health in honey bee colonies.

The survey, which asks both commercial and small-scale beekeepers to track the health and survival rates of their honey bee colonies, is conducted each year by the Bee Informed Partnership in collaboration with the Apiary Inspectors of America, with funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). A summary of the 2014-2015 results is available upon request prior to May 13, 2015; thereafter the results will be added to previous years' results publicly available on the Bee Informed website.

Of course, thanks to the good Doctor we know bees are actually disappearing in anticipation of the Earth being stolen from space by Davros.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 15 2015, @01:57PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday May 15 2015, @01:57PM (#183333) Journal

    Do you have a sense for how viable it is to keep bees in a suburban setting? I mostly see hives in rural settings, but wonder if we could start a hive at our house in the suburbs.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by sudo rm -rf on Friday May 15 2015, @02:45PM

    by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Friday May 15 2015, @02:45PM (#183351) Journal

    Please take everything I write with a grain of salt, I only started helping out last year and do so only every two or three weeks.
    The bees we keep are in the middle of Berlin (3.4M people), and this year they gather pollen like crazy.
    Bees search for pollen within a circle of a mean radius of 3km around the hive, up to five. If there's a lot of trees or fields in that area, they should be fine. The main thing to consider is, as I pointed out above, the neighbors. You should definetly talk to those living next door, because a lot of people are afraid of bees. You can control the flight path by aligning the beehive to point away from frequented areas like sidewalks or other gardens. Give them a few meters of open room in front of the hive, so the swarm can scatter a bit. Other than that, be prepared to spend a few hundred bucks of equipment in the beginning, also bees get aggressive when you smell of alcohol and never wear black clothes - they'll mistake you for a bear (seriously, that's what the expert on the television said!)
    Here's a link to a magazine called Apidologie [springer.com] with a more scientific approach. While the magazine is from a collaboration of French and German scientists, it's articles are mainly in English (so I've heard)