The Honeybee Conservancy

© 2011 NYC Beekeeping

Since the beekeeping ban in NYC was lifted in March 2010, urban beekeeping has taken off in The Big Apple. NYC Beekeeping is offering their annual free in-depth course in beekeeping, “The Bee Course,” which resumes December 8th.  Here is the description on their site:

If you are curious about bees and beekeeping, now is a great time to start The Bee Course.  We will be offering this in depth program in cooperation with NYC Parks Dept for the 4th year in 2011-2012.

The first sessions give you foundations in bee biology and behavior and will help you determine whether you’ll be ready to keep bees on your own this Spring, would prefer to join a community team, or just want to learn and volunteer with us. In spring as weather permits, we progress to hands-on sessions in our urban apiaries, exposing students to dozens of hives at various stages of growth.

The Course is offered free of charge.

Registration is here.

Feel free to share this info on your blog or social media accounts (esp. Twitter)!

Source: NobelPrize.org

Today we remember Karl von Frisch (11/20/1886–6/12/1982), the Austrian zoologist who discovered that the bees use dance as a language to communicate the location of food.  This theory was greeted with skepticism when first introduced.  In addition to studying their dance, Mr. von Frisch also studied their usage of pheromones and their vision.  In 1973, Karl von Frisch was one of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

One of our favorite artists, John Stark, will have an upcoming exhibition, Apiculture, opening on the 6th of October at Charlie Smith Gallery in London.  We published a short blog post about his art back in August of 2010.

Copyright John Stark

An interview with John Stark in Spoonfed sheds some light on beekeeping imagery that is woven through a number of his paintings:

These beehives form the narrative crux of the exhibition, and lend a new “conceptual cohesion” to John’s work. Under the title of Apiculture, the works trace the ritual undertakings of a series of strange figures, like a cult of bee-keepers, anonymous under brightly coloured hoods and black face-masks. These bees, for John, are  “a really nice open metaphor, that can be read in so many different ways. All through the history of literature and art, the beehive has been cited as an example of utopian society, of a selfless existence. Do these hives represent the world? An idealised world? Art, even? Are the keepers the artists, producing the art, or the collectors harvesting the art?” Importantly, these possibilities are kept delicately open.

Copyright John Stark

John Stark – Apiculture can be seen at the Charlie Smith London gallery from October 6 to November 12,  2011.

Life With Wings. 1 of 4 Panels. Copyright Mika Holtzinger 2008. Click to view more.

As you may know, EB White was the author of the much-beloved books “Charlotte’s Web,” “Stuart Little” and “The Elements of Style.” But did you also know he was a dedicated beekeeper?   With a dash of humor, E.B. White addressed queen rearing in this poem, which was published in The New Yorker December 15, 1945:

Song of the Queen Bee

“The breeding of the bee,” says a United States Department of Agriculture bulletin on artificial insemination, “has always been handicapped by the fact that the queen mates in the air with whatever drone she encounters.”

When the air is wine and the wind is free
and the morning sits on the lovely leaf,
and sunlight ripples on every tree
Then love-in-air is the thing for me
I’m a bee,
I’m a ravishing, rollicking, young queen bee,
That’s me.
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Napoleon's bee

The 5th of May, 1821. On this day, Napoleon Bonaparte, the former French Emperor, died on St. Helena.

Although he was never a beekeeper, Napoleon used the honey bee as one of the most important symbols of the power and prestige of his empire.

There seems to be two schools of thought of why Napoleon’s government chose the honey bee as part of its iconography. Read the rest of this entry →

Have you ever noticed that some of the bees you see flying have these orange or yellow clumps on their hind legs?

If you haven’t, they look like this.

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LIFE Magazine Aug 11, 1952. The cover, a black-and-white closeup of Joan Rice, announced her as “Robin Hood’s New Girlfriend”.  Also on the cover, a headline  announcing, “Farewell to Eva Peron.”  But what is not alluded to on the cover is the edit piece that you and I probably would have gotten the most delight out of reading: an arresting full-color photo essay titled, The Life of the Bee. Paintings By Microscope Reveal the Busy World Inside The Hive.  Let’s have a look…

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Consider Replacing Part or All of Your Front Lawn with a Pollinator-Friendly Garden

Photo by Michaela, The Gardener's Eden.

Lush, wide, green and rolling: In America, we love our lawns. We like to sprawl out on the grass for a picnic, gather on the neighbor’s lawn for a game of touch football, and set up our folding chairs and tiki-torches in the backyard green for summer barbeques. I like doing these things too, and I have a small lawn of my own in Vermont. But it’s important to remember that lawns, from an environmental perspective, provide little support for the ecosystem. In fact the tremendous amount of water, fossil fuel, fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides used to maintain most suburban lawns makes our green-fixation downright irresponsible. And although green areas do reduce heat in cities, tightly cropped lawns do little to create habitat and provide food for birds, bees and the many other creatures sharing our world. Read the rest of this entry →

NYC Beekeeping, which offers free beekeeping classes and takes part in extensive outreach, is hosting a talk on Saturday, February 19, 2011 at 2:00 pm with Professor Tom Seeley.  Dr. Seely, a Professor at Cornell, will speak on the topic of his new book “Honeybee Democracy: How Bees Choose a Home.”

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