The Honeybee Conservancy

EarthFest 2013 at the Battery Conservancy Urban Farm

Join us as we work with nycbeekeeping.org to raise awareness about bees and beekeeping at EARTH FEST, an exciting event by The Battery Conservancy and Battery Urban Farmers and friends designed to raise awareness about food and farming and the roles that both play in sustainable communities.

EARTH FEST is free and open to the public, and will take place at Battery Urban farm on Saturday April 20 from 11am to 3pm in NYC.

This family-friendly event will offer arts and crafts, workshops, site tours, educational games, a “Roof to Table” photography exhibit, a “Meet the Farmers” table, and a community Clothing & Kitchen Swap all geared to encourage food, farming, and sustainability in NYC.  Live music and Greenmarket-sourced refreshments will round out the event.

We’re committed to working towards a more sustainable future, which is why on Earth Day Weekend, we joined nycbeekeeping.org to speak on Urban Beekeeping at Green Festival®, the largest sustainability event in the world, held in LEED-certified North Pavilion of New York City’s Javits Center

This year’s festival features talks and panels by esteemed experts such as as Frances Moore Lappe (Diet for a Small Planet and the upcoming EcoMind) and Mark Tercek, President and CEO of the Nature Conservancy. Over 300 eco-friendly businesses featuring the latest and greatest in sustainable products and services will be there as well.

Our talk is at 3pm on Sunday. Come join us!

© 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)!

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.

“There is something palpable about these new MacArthur Fellows, about their character as explorers and pioneers at the cutting edge. These are women and men improving, protecting, and making our world a better place for us all. “   ~~ Daniel J. Socolow, Director of the MacArthur Fellows Program

Big news for the honeybee.

Earlier today, Marla Spivak, an entomologist from the University of Minnesota who is studying the impacts of nutrition, pesticides, and bee diseases on bee health, was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow.  These so-called Genius Grants provide $500,000 to each fellow, with no strings attached.

Go Marla!

It’s nice to see people who are working to solve the mystery of colony collapse get a little recognition … and support!

Finding the answer will definitely make the world a better place for us all.

“That buzzing-noise means something. If there’s a buzzing noise, somebody’s making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you’re a bee … and the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey … and the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.” ~~ Winnie the Pooh

I love Pooh.  Really, I do.  But as Piglet says, “Pooh hasn’t much Brain.”  So, as National Honey Month comes to a close, I’d like to point out a few other amazing things that honeybees do that give us humans more reasons to love them.  As if making honey (the only food produced by an insect that is eaten by man, by the way) and doing the lionshare of pollinating food crops wasn’t enough! Read the rest of this entry →

Photo by jfschmit

September is National Honey Month. It’s an ideal time to celebrate honey and indulge in your craving for this sweet and viscous food known as “liquid gold.”  While indulging, why not focus on local honey, or honey made as close as possible to your home?  Here are five potent reasons to step away from the generic honey bear at your local supermarket and instead reach for a jar (or more!) of local honey. Read the rest of this entry →

Imagine that you are a commercial beekeeper. The rule of thumb is that you need 500 or more hives to justify keeping bees as a full time job. That is a lot of money tied up in equipment.
You have a bank note that you pay on annually for said equipment with proceeds from the honey crop. Uh oh. You see mites. You follow the advice of the experts that monitor the bee problems. They recommend you take action with some chemical or other intervention. Whew! You make your order and while you are waiting for it to arrive…
…You go to your monthly local bee club meeting. And the new guy is talking about natural beekeeping. He has found that you can stop placing chemicals and high fructose corn syrup in your hives.
“Geez”, you say, “but the HFCS is so much cheaper than honey. How can I compete with the commercially produced and imported honey that is sold at the local grocery store? You want me to let my bees eat honey all winter? How will I make my payments to the bank? You say I need to stop medicating? What if I lose all my bees? I have my whole life tied up in this operation. I can’t take that risk. If the government will compensate me for my losses, why should I take that risk?” Read the rest of this entry →

“Hey farmer, farmer, put away your DDT.  I don’t care about spots on my apples.  Just leave me the birds and the bees, please.” Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell

Did you see this little news item that ran back in May:  “Italy Bans Pesticide for Bee Health”? I honestly thought at the time that it would generate more … um … buzz than it ultimately did in the media and among beekeepers, farmers, gardeners, nature lovers, as well as everyone else who likes to eat.  I’m not surprised, though.  We were likely all distracted by the 24/7 coverage of another end-of-times scenario playing out in slow motion in the Gulf of Mexico.  It has lately been a very intense news cycle, and I guess colony collapse is so very 2006.

In case you missed it, it seems that last year as a “precautionary measure” the Italian Agriculture Department banned the use of nicotine-based pesticides (known as neonicotinoids)  that coat or are infused into crop seeds – in particular corn, sunflower, rapeseed seeds — and their precautionary bet paid off.  Bee populations were restored!  There were no significant bee losses in the apiaries around the corn fields.  In southern Italian citrus groves and vineyards where these neonicotinoids were not banned, bee losses continue unabated.

Hmmmmm.

Read the rest of this entry →

What is it about that title?
Hmmmm…….. ED Erectile dysfunction, RLS restless leg syndrome, ADD Attention deficit disorder.
One thing I have noticed about human nature is that we need to identify, label and vilify the “disorder” so that we can blame someone else, create a patented wonder drug complete with research funding to solve the problem, and of course get bailout funding.
Take for example, the other day I’m in Wal-mart sitting on a bench waiting for my lovely wife. I can hear on the pre-recorded background noise coming from the pharmacy that “dry mouth is a treatable condition”. I was shocked to hear the announcer say that “it might be treatable by sipping water or using [their product].” Go figure! Read the rest of this entry →