Category — Bees

800 bee colonies went loose

by Rob Olson and Mike Durkin
Fox 9
May 24

LAKEVILLE, Minn. – A truck hauling bees was involved in a multiple-vehicle crash Monday morning on Interstate 35 in Lakeville, Minnesota, killing one person.

Two semi trucks, one carrying bees, and two cars crashed on northbound Interstate 35 at County Road 70 around 11:30 a.m. Minnesota State Patrol spokesman Lt. Eric Roeske confirmed one person is dead and one person. Kari J. Rasmussen, 24, was airlifted to a nearby hospital — where she is in critical condition.

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Maria Keating, City Farmer’s Bug Lady, points out all the different Mason Bee houses at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden.

Orchard Mason Bee

Excerpt from a fact sheet by the Oregon Master Gardener™ Association.

Overview

The orchard mason bee, Osmia lignaria, is an effective early pollinator native to the Western US and Canada. It emerges in the spring, before honeybees. As a pollinator, it is far more efficient than the honeybee by transferring more pollen and visiting more types and numbers of flowers.

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Kirk Anderson addresses members of Backward Beekeepers, an organization in Los Angeles that meets monthly to swap stories about urban beekeeping. Photo: Ben Murray

TakePart looks at city beekeepers

By Salvatore Cardoni
TakePart Social Action Network
March 30, 2010

Excerpt:

It’s a resplendent Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles, that rare smog-free day. You decide to charbroil some burgers for lunch. You creek open the lid of your backyard grill and…bzzZZZzzzz! A bee-hive! In ten seconds flat, you’ve hi-tailed it back into the house, slammed the door, and Googled “exterminator.”

Best to kill those sons-a-beeswax before they swarm, right? Wrong!

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Demonstration project part of the effort to make Vancouver the greenest city in the world

By Tiffany Crawford
The Vancouver Sun
19 Mar 2010

Excerpt:

Vancouver is moving ahead with plans to make the city greener by installing beehives on the roof of city hall.

In a memo circulated to all staff this week, the city said that in an effort to make Vancouver the greenest city in the world, there will be a demonstration beehive project on the roof of the east wing. The demonstration will include the installation of two hives.

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“The real danger is the skewed public perception of the danger of honeybees,” said Andrew Coté, of the New York City Beekeepers Association. Photo by Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Big Apple Lifts Beekeeper Ban

By MARIEL SMITH
Associated Press
Mar 16, 2010

Big Apple beekeepers are all a buzz with joy after the New York City’s Board of Health voted Tuesday reversed a long-standing ban on tending to honeybees.

Health officials had previously banned beekeeping because honeybees were considered just as dangerous as hyenas and poisonous snakes.

But the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene unanimously amended the law after research showed that honeybees, specifically the Apis mellifera, are not harmful to the public, citing few bee stings around the city, reported the New York Times.

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Urban Bee Rescuers. Photo credit: Janet and Kelly
“We were just beekeeping as a hobby, as gardeners and nature lovers, and soon we could not keep up with the amount of emails from people who wanted us to rescue their bees. So now we are the founders of backyardbees.net.”

Photos collected by The Daily Green and Bee Culture magazine. They salute city beekeepers.

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Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times

A Bountiful Buzz – From the south lawn, a sweet smell of honey

By ELISABETH GOODRIDGE
November 4, 2009, 3:49 PM
The New York Times
The Politics and Government Blog

A new type of visitor came to the National Mall this year, flitting past monuments and museums in favor of trees, flowers and plants. But this wasn’t just some horticultural tour; no, this was work. Each day they were abuzz, gathering and pollinating before returning home to modest quarters with tremendous security near Lafayette Park.

Meet the White House honeybee.

Numbering more than 65,000 at one point, the bees produced a bumper crop of honey this year, the first time honey has ever been made on White House grounds. The hive, located on the South Lawn, is a key part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s organic kitchen garden project.

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NYC’s Cool New Backyard Farms: Growing More Than Just Produce from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Liza de Guia’s Videos – New York City Food Storyteller

Shot & Edited by storyteller, Liza de Guia.
On-air host, documentary filmmaker and editor.
Her hosted shows (Daily Greens, Media Mulch, Versus and Planet Police) featured on the on-line web channel TitanGreen.com was recently awarded a 2008 People’s Voice Webby Award for Best Online Video in Public Service and Activism.

NYC’s Cool New Backyard Farms: Growing More Than Just Produce

Urban NYC farmers have set their eyes on a new prize: transforming privately owned backyards into lush, fruitful farmlands.

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Photo by Franco Zecchin. Paris, the urban beekeeper Jean Paucton removing frames from the hive atop the Opera Garnier.

By Charles Bremner in Paris
The Times
August 18, 2009

Tourists are not the only species swarming on the Champs Élysées this August. Also enjoying the sunshine are squadrons of bees, part of a fast-multiplying population that is making honey a new Parisian industry.

The Tuileries, Luxembourg and other lesser gardens of Paris are now home to hundreds of thousands of bees that are far more productive than their country cousins.

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Graeme Evans, director of housekeeping at Vancouver’s Fairmont Waterfront hotel, opens a hive last week to show off the bees and their honey to guests. A beekeeper, Evans keeps beehives on a deck at the hotel. And no, he doesn’t wear protective gear. Photograph by Gerry Kahrmann, The Province

Bees cause buzz at Fairmont hotel

Three hives on third-floor deck provide kitchen with honey, guests with stories

By Christina Montgomery,
The Province Newspaper
June 7, 2009

Graeme Evans is undoubtedly Vancouver’s nattiest – and most hospitable – beekeeper.

You won’t catch Evans in one of those bulky, netted helmets and spacesuits that most of his colleagues don when tending their hives. He looks after his trio of nests while wearing a dapper, crisply pressed suit. And tie.

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Once again Maria takes us up close to insects at the Compost Demonstration Garden. In this video she captures honey bees drinking nectar from Borage
flowers.

More on Borage here.

Photo by Michael Levenston

The six-acre green roof is the largest in Canada, with 400,000 indigenous plants and grasses and several beehives installed to house a colony of bees.

Green Bee

Just like the green roof, bees are essential to a sustainable environment.

During the day, bees are a busy lot – weaving their way through our cities and countryside, gathering pollen and pollinating flowers and agricultural plants. Insect pollinated plants make up 1/3 of our diet with industrious bees pollinating 80% of those crops.

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Photo in Greensgrow Gallery. See larger photo and more images here.

By Jon Hurdle
New York Times, May 20, 2008

PHILADELPHIA — Amid the tightly packed row houses of North Philadelphia, a pioneering urban farm is providing fresh local food for a community that often lacks it, and making money in the process.

Greensgrow, a one-acre plot of raised beds and greenhouses on the site of a former steel-galvanizing factory, is turning a profit by selling its own vegetables and herbs as well as a range of produce from local growers, and by running a nursery selling plants and seedlings.

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Interview with Kirk on Michael Olson’s Food Chain RadioShow #591.
Michael is the author of the award-winning book “MetroFarm”, a 576-page guide to metropolitan agriculture.

“Bees are so sensitive they appear to die at the first sign of trouble. As such, they have become the canaries in the mine of our environment. But this leads us to ask, ‘Why are bees thriving in the unnatural environment of Los Angeles?’

“Topics include the difference between keeping bees in the city and in the country; how urban bee keepers are creating communities of bee people in cities around the world; and what it takes to become involved in urban bee keeping.”

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