Honey

Honeybee decision-making ability rivals any department committee

When 10,000 honeybees fly the coop to hunt for a new home, usually a tree cavity, they have a unique method of deciding which site is right: With great efficiency they narrow down the options and minimize their bad decisions. The Seeley group's study, which is pub...

Healing honey: The sweet evidence revealed

Substantial evidence demonstrates that honey, one of the oldest healing remedies known to medicine, produces effective results when used as a wound dressing. A review article in the most recent issue of SAGE Publications' International Journal of Lower Extremity Wounds summarizes the data. Scientists performed 22 trials involving 2,062 patients treated with honey, as well as an additional...

Honey helps problem wounds

A household remedy millennia old is being reinstated: honey helps the treatment of some wounds better than the most modern antibiotics. For several years now medical experts from the University of Bonn have been clocking up largely positive experience with what is known as medihoney. Even chronic wounds infected with multi-resistant bacteria often healed within a few weeks. In conjunction with co...

Beekeepers work hard for the honey, despite changing tupelo forest

Van Morrison sang about it, Peter Fonda starred in a movie about it, and people from all over the world will pay top dollar just to get some of it. Florida State University geography Professor J. Anthony Stallin...

Scientists identify 36 genes, 100 neuropeptides in honey bee brains

From humans to honey bees, neuropeptides control brain activity and, hence, our behaviors. Understanding the roles these peptides play in the life of a honey bee will assist researchers in understanding the roles they play in their human counterparts. There are a million neurons in the brain of a honey bee (Apis mellifera), a brain not much larger than the size of the period at the end of...

Detecting explosives with honeybees

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a method for training the common honey bee to detect the explosives used in bombs. Based on knowledge of bee biology, the new techniques could become a leading tool in the fight against the use of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, which present a critical vulnerability for American military troops abroad and is an emerging danger f...

Honey bee genome holds clues to social behavior

By studying the humble honey bee, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have come a step closer to understanding the molecular basis of social behavior in humans. "The honey bee (Apis millifera) has been called a model system for social behavior," said Saurabh (pronounced SAW-rub) Sinha, a professor of computer science and an affiliate of the university's Institute...

Honeydew honeys are better antioxidants than nectar honeys

A study of 36 Spanish honeys from different floral origins revealed that honeys generated by bees feeding on honeydew have greater antioxidant properties than those produced by bees feeding on nectar. The study is published in this month’s edition of the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. Naturally occurring antioxidants are important ingredients of many foods, and keenly soug...

Detecting poisons in nectar is an odour-ous task for honeybees

Though many spring flowers have bright advertisements offering sweet rewards to honeybees, some common flowers have not-so-sweet or even toxic nectars. Why plants would try to poison the honeybees they wish to attract is a scientific mystery. The honeybee, which accounts for the pollination of at least 1/3 of the world’s crop plants, may encounter such poisoned nectar in common crop and g...

Undergraduate research shows leaderless honeybee organizing

Pierce’s discovery has to do with detecting a significant new detail concerning the beh...