Honey Run Apiaries-A Beekeeper’s Blog

I just received notice that the Auglaize County Extension Bee School to be held April 19th has been canceled because they did not receive enough advance registrations.  They said they plan on holding an evening class in May instead, tentatively May 6.  I’ll post details here as soon as I have them.

Note:  I was not aware based on the fliers distributed that they were expecting advanced registration and I suspect they would have had plenty of people show up based on those I’ve talked to. 

The spring season has started in earnest. This past Saturday the silver maples started blooming and by Sunday enough was blooming that the bees were completely ignoring the open feed pollen substitute. Probably a good thing as real pollen is better for them and I was starting to run out of substitute as they had consumed nearly two 5 gallon buckets worth.

The weather Sunday was quite warm in the upper 60\’s. Many of the hives had a significant amount of drone brood and the strongest had adult drones. At least one hive had several hundred adult drones…which means it\’s time to start grafting…right on time. I made up one queenless hive, reducing it from 4 medium boxes to 3 from the strongest hive I had checked and grafted the next day, Monday. Checked the grafts on Tuesday and found almost all were accepted so things are progressing nicely. The real work begins late next week…inspecting hives and making up dozens of mating nucs.

Researchers at the Ohio State Bee lab announced they have found a new tool to fight terrorism, the honey bee.

In 2005, scientists from the University of Montana, Montana State University and The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration conducted successful tests showing that the honey bee could be trained to find landmines.  By feeding the bees sugar water containing traces of the explosive, the bees will hunt out the land mines by smell and the bees can be tracked with Lidar.  These amazing insects only miss their target less than 1% of the time.

Now researches from Ohio State have found a way to use this same mechanism to hunt out terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere.  They have found that they can train the honey bees to seek out humans by body oder. In addition, by using the more aggressive Africanized honey bee, who’s defense response can be triggered by CO2 in our breath, the bees will actively seek out and sting their target.  While this may only serve to be a minor annoyance to the terrorists, researchers are working on potent sedatives that can be fed to the bees that won’t affect the bees but will find it’s way into the bees venom.  While the bees do die when they sting, they are relatively inexpensive and it is simple to train new bees.

"The goal is not to harm anyone, but to incapacitate them so troops may move in safely.  This could revolutionize how suspects are apprehended up and virtually eliminate hazards to our troops or civilians.  It’s a very promising technology and we’ve had interest from the FBI and several other state law enforcement agencies hoping to use it."

Recent calls to the Ohio State Bee Lab to obtain additional information and verify the above fact were not returned.

No terrorists were immediately available to comment on the ironic use of suicidal bee attacks to apprehend terrorists.