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Bee Way Honey News
13-Jun-2008
Pesticides,
pathogen may be killing bees
15-Jun-2007
What's
Happening to the Bees? 07-May-2007
What's behind the label? Not what you think.
28-Mar-2007
Where Have All the Bees
Gone? 24-Mar-2007
Bee Mystery Deepens
23-Mar-2007
Honeydew Honeys Are Better Antioxidants Than Nectar Honeys February
27-Feb-2007
Bee Emergency
Stranger Than We Thought
15-Feb-2007
Mystery illness devastates honeybee colonies 14-Feb-2007
Bee Emergency Bigger Than
Ever 14-Feb-2007
The Case Of The Vanishing
Bees 13-Feb-2007
Queen
Bees Shown To Pass Viruses To Their Offspring
05-Jan-2007
Bee Bomb Detectors
11-Dec-2006
Big Bee Emergency
23-Oct-2006
Wild Bees
Make Honeybees Better Pollinators
24-Sep-2006
Don't Like Cold
Food? Bees Don't Either
22-Aug-2006
Honey Helps Problem Wounds
27-Jul-2006
Quantum Bee Dance
21-Jul-2006
Healing Honey: The Sweet Evidence Revealed
07-Apr-2006
We're Losing
Bees But Can't Do Without Them
18-Jul-2005
Honey Could Be Healthy Alternative To High-fructose Corn Syrup In Halloween
Candy 21-Oct-2004
Honey The Darker The Better Has Potential As Dietary Antioxidant
10-Apr-2002
Dark Honey Has More Illness-Fighting Agents Than Light Honey
08-Jul-1998
Bee Way Honey News
13-June-2008
We have had a very cold spring therefore resulting in a shortage of honey. With
the warm weather coming up, honey production should begin by July.
We also have secured a new contract with a local bakery to deliver one drum of
honey per week.
We have rebuilt our bees population to two thousand colonies. They are currently
all in Oregon.
Pesticides, pathogen may be killing bees
15-June-2007
 LEWISBURG,
Pa. - Scientists investigating a mysterious ailment that has killed many of the
nation's honeybees are concentrating on pesticides and microorganisms as
possible causes of the disorder, and some beekeepers are refusing to place their
hives near chemically treated fields.
Scientists from Penn State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture
are leading the research into the disease, which has killed tens of thousands of
bee colonies in at least 35 states.
The die-off has threatened the livelihood of commercial beekeepers and
strained fruit growers and other farmers who rely on bees to pollinate more than
90 flowering crops, including apples, nuts and citrus trees.
After months of study, researchers cannot tie the ailment to any single
factor. But scientists are focused on a new, unnamed pathogen found in dead
bees, and on the role of pesticides, said Maryann Frazier, a senior extension
associate in the university's entomology department.
David Hackenberg was the first beekeeper to report the disorder to Penn State
last fall after losing nearly 75 percent of his 3,200 colonies.
He has rebuilt his business to 2,400 colonies but now asks growers whether
they use the chemicals because he is convinced the bees are being harmed by
pesticides, especially a type called neonicotinoids.
"I'm quizzing every farmer around," Hackenberg said. "If you're going to use
that stuff, then you're going to have go to somebody else."
If bees continue to die, he said, Hackenberg Apiaries may have to raise
prices to replace dead hives. The business charges about $90 a hive to "lease"
bees in fields. Replacing a hive with new bees costs $120.
Neonicotinoids do not contain nicotine — the addictive drug found in tobacco
— but they are named after it because they target nerve cells in a similar way.
Bayer Crop Science is one of the nation's top producers of neonicotinoid
pesticides, which have been on the market since 1994. But company spokesman John
Boyne said neonicotinoids are not the cause of the honeybees' demise.
"We have done a significant amount of research on our products, and we are
comfortable this it is not the cause," Boyne said. He said "a number of
nonchemical causes may be to blame."
Beekeeper Jim Aucker, of Millville, was left with just 240 of his 1,200 hives
earlier this spring after the illness struck. He's back up to nearly 600 hives
now and is convinced pesticides are playing a role after finding chemicals that
had been sprayed on crops in the dead hives.
"Whether it's 100 percent the cause, I'm not sure, but I'm positive it's not
helping," Aucker said. He doesn't plan to return to fields where he thinks there
might be a pesticide problem.
Daniel Weaver, president of the American Beekeeping Federation, said he is
not surprised some beekeepers are avoiding fields with pesticides.
"I try to limit my association to growers that I know will be responsible" he
said, referring to farmers who avoid applying pesticide while the bees are
flying. "Of course, I can't escape it completely."
But he also cautioned that the bees' immune systems may have been weakened
for reasons unrelated to pathogens or pesticides, such as mites.
Reports from other beekeepers varied in mid-June — a time when bee colonies
are supposed to be thriving. Some beekeepers said they are losing bees, while
others are holding steady or growing colonies again.
Hackenberg said he even tried to disinfect many of his hives by sending them
through a giant radiation machine in Mulberry, Fla., run by a private firm that
typically treats pharmaceuticals and food products.
But he fears what might happen if his bees fall ill again. As he worked with
a thriving hive on a hill above his house, his cell phone rang with a caller
asking about lining up bees for 2008.
"Yeah, we sell bees," he said, "if we're still in business next year."
More
information
 The
recent food label changes made by the Food and Drug Administration help
consumers make better-informed weight management decisions when purchasing food.
In the wake of fad diets and a fast growing population of health-conscious
individuals, reading the food label at the grocery store is routine for
shoppers. However, a recent study conducted by the National Honey Board reveals
that when it comes to honey, consumers are confused by what exactly is inside
the honey bottle.
Pure honey is exactly what it says it is - 100% pure honey
- and has only 21 calories per teaspoon. There are no added ingredients because
it is all natural. Honey is simply made by bees and bottled by people. So, why
the puzzlement? Because companies are making products that are known in the
industry as Honey Pretenders.
Buyer Beware: A honey pretender is a product that looks
like honey and may even taste like honey. But if you look closely at the label
it is actually made from other sweeteners mixed with honey or colored to look
like honey (sometimes referred to as a honey blend).
These non-pure honey products are baffling consumers
because the label clearly says honey even though the product has been
adulterated and is not 100% pure honey.
Whether labeled as Blended Honey, Honey Blend or Honey
Syrup, non-pure honey pretender products appear to represent a serious threat to
the sales of pure honey.
www.honey.com
 The
US is reporting a massive sudden decline in honeybee colonies across 22 states –
a potential disaster for agriculture since bees pollinate crops worth $14
billion each year. The precise cause remains elusive, but researchers are
investigating all culprits from pathogens and pesticides to the nature of
beekeeping.
Newswise — IT IS a vanishing on the scale of entire cities.
Late in 2006, commercial beekeepers in Florida began noticing alarming numbers
of their bees had gone missing. Bustling colonies, tens of thousands strong,
were emptying in a matter of days. Systematic searches for dead bees around the
colonies mostly drew a blank. “Imagine waking one morning to find 80 per cent of
the people in your community are just gone,” says May Berenbaum of the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Before long 22 states were reporting similar stories,
raising fears that bees were in serious trouble – potentially a big disaster for
farmers since bees pollinate crops worth $14 billion each year in the US.
There is no shortage of potential culprits; European
honeybees make up the vast majority of commercial stocks in the US and they are
susceptible to myriad viral and fungal blights and two forms of parasitic mites,
one of which wiped out about half of the American honeybee population in the
1980s. Yet, in this instance, the precise cause of the sudden decline, dubbed
“colony collapse disorder”, remains elusive. The pattern of disappearance offers
few clues, since CCD appears to be widespread and plagues nonmigrating colonies
as well as those that are moved from place to place to pollinate crops.
http://www.newscientist.com
More Information
Bee Mystery Deepens
23-Mar-2007
 Linda
Howe will soon file a report on the current mystery of missing bees. This has
been going on for about a year, when commercial beekeepers first began noticing
that huge numbers of their bees were missing.
In New Scientist, Michael Reilly quotes bee expert May
Berenbaum as saying, "Imagine waking one morning to find 80% of the people in
your community are just gone."
Reilly reports that, "bustling colonies, tens of thousands
strong, were emptying in a matter of days. Systematic searches for dead bees
around the colonies mostly drew a blank." As we noted in an earlier story, piles
of dead bees have turned up in swimming pools in some locations, but they mostly
seem to have vanished into thin air.
European honeybees, the kind that pollinate our crops, are
susceptible to several kinds of parasites. One of these killed about half the US
bee population in the 1980s. Tests on the dead bees they have been able to find
do not reveal that they died from pesticide exposure. In Linda Howe's report
will quote a researcher who thinks these bees may be affected by
genetically-modified crops.
Honeydew Honeys Are Better Antioxidants Than Nectar
Honeys
27-Feb-2007
 Science Daily — 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 sought in many ‘health foods’. They are believed to help protect people
from diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disorders, neurodegenerative diseases
and aging. They operate by mopping up potentially damaging free radicals that
are released in the body. Honey is one source of antioxidants.
The composition of honey depends greatly on where honeybees collect their raw
materials. There are two key types of source. First, honeybees can collect
nectar from flowers, and this generates nectar honeys. Secondly they can collect
fluids that exude from plants, usually after the plants have been visited by a
plant-sucking insect and this generates honeydew honeys.
“Honey is a natural source of antioxidants, and among honeys, honeydew honey
is the best,” says researcher Rosa Ana Pérez, who works at the Instituto
Madrileño de Investigación y Desarrollo Rural, Agrario y Alimentario, in Madrid,
Spain.
Each of the 36 honeys was exposed to a range of physical and chemical tests.
Honeys with high antioxidant properties (measured by the DPPH test) also had
high total polyphenol content, net absorbance (as colour parameter), pH and
electrical conductivity.
“These laboratory results show some aspects that people could use to get an
idea about which honeys are likely to have the most potent antioxidant
properties,” says Pérez.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by John
Wiley & Sons, Inc..
More Information
Bee Emergency Stranger Than We Thought
15-Feb-2007
 We're
in the middle of a bee emergency. Albert Einstein said, "If the bee disappeared
off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years left to live."
A mysterious ailment called Colony Collapse Disorder is causing agricultural
honeybees nationwide to abandon their hives and disappear. It's a kind of mass
suicide in the bee world.
Entomologist Jerry Bromenshenk says,
"Individual beekeepers are really taking a beating. A guy down in Oklahoma lost
80% of his 13,000 colonies in the last month. In Florida, there are a whole lot
of people facing 40, 60 and 80 percent losses. That’s huge."
With CCD, most adult honeybees abandon a
hive and disappear, abandoning the queen and a remnant of younger bees. This is
unheard of, since normally a bee colony will do almost anything to protect its
queen. Since the tasks done in the hive are very stratified, bees cannot survive
on their own.
One of the strongest instincts that bees
have is protecting and nurturing the next generation, but with CCD, the cells of
young bees in the pupa stage are not covered and protected by their older
sisters, probably because most of the adult bees have left. Dead adult bees
aren't even found near the hive; they are just gone.
Bromenshenk says, "We don’t want to
panic the beekeeper industry because we are not sure it's time to push the panic
button yet, but we do know this is real, it's severe and it's widespread."
Field technician and self-professed bee
lover Scott Debnam describes visits to the impacted bee yards as "spooky," and
says, "Fortunately the sites I've visited have been recovering, but in Georgia I
saw a lot of small colonies, a lot of uncapped brood and a lot of early-stage
brood. The adults had flown the coop."
More Information
 A mysterious illness
is devastating honeybee populations across the US from California to Florida,
claiming up to 80% of colonies in some areas. The losses of honeybees could
disrupt the pollination of food crops, researchers warn.
Beekeepers are finding once-healthy colonies abandoned just
a few days later, says Jerry Bromenshank, at the University of Montana at
Missoula and Bee Alert Technology, a company monitoring the problem: “In most
cases the only one left is the queen, along with a few young bees.”
The absence of dead bees makes it difficult to know what
ails them and where they have gone. Furthermore, experts cannot track the spread
of the mysterious illness. “The problem is that it strikes out of the blue,”
says Bromenshank.
At a loss for an explanation, researchers have referred to
the honeybee decline as “colony collapse disorder”. Reports of the problem have
intensified in recent weeks and spanned 22 states, but some beekeepers say that
they began seeing their colonies decline almost two years ago.
Almonds and apples
Researchers say colony collapse disorder might be a
re-emergence of a similarly mysterious illness that struck US honeybees in the
1960s. Experts never pinpointed the cause behind that previous bee crisis,
according to Bromenshank. He notes that in light of this some people have
jokingly termed the problem the “disappearing-disappearing illness”.
But beekeepers and farmers see no humour in the potential
economic costs of drastic honeybee decline. Almond crops are immediately
vulnerable because they rely on honeybee pollination at this time of year. And
the insect decline could potentially affect other crops later in the year, such
as apples and blueberries.
Bromenshank speculates that dry conditions in the autumn
reduced the natural food supply of the honeybees, making them more vulnerable to
some sort of virus – such as deformed wing virus – or fungal infection. He notes
that the abandoned colonies are not repopulated by other honeybees or insects
for at least a few weeks. This, he says, is consistent with the presence of
toxic fungal residues from the dying bees that repel other insects from
re-inhabiting the colony.
Other scientists have tentatively blamed the problem on
pesticides or chemicals specifically designed to control mites in bee colonies.
http://www.newscientist.com
Bee Emergency Bigger Than Ever
14-Feb-2007
 Mites,
pesticides and extreme winter weather are being blamed for the loss of billions
of bees just as they are needed to pollinate crops nationwide. The number of
honeybee colonies in the US has dropped by 50% in the past 25 years, and the
winter die-off this year has made the situation much worse. Without bees to
pollinate them, crops fail. There is no other means of pollination.
In the Jackson Hole Star Tribune, Olivia
Munoz quotes US Dept. of Agriculture bee expert Dennis vanEngelsdorp as saying,
"It's startling. We were just starting to get information through word-of-mouth
from beekeepers in the east a couple months ago and we thought about what it was
going to mean once it got time for them to travel to California." What it could
mean is future famine right here in the US.
The Case Of The Vanishing Bees
13-Feb-2007
(CBS) In
spite of all the advances in agriculture, honeybees remain indispensable. By
moving pollen from flower to flower, bees are the only efficient way for many
crops to pollinate, CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports.
As growing season begins in California's Central Valley, there is nothing quite
as busy as a beekeeper. Farmers pay them to put their hives in their fields and
orchards.
"It means the difference between profit and loss for them," says beekeeper Lance
Sundberg.
But beekeepers like Sundberg have a mystery in their hives this year. Bees are
disappearing at an alarming rate.
"Colonies are going down. The bees aren't dead in the box or aren't out front,"
says Jerry Bromenshenk, a bee researcher at the University of Montana. "They've
just disappeared. Just vanished."
Bromenshenk is leading a team of bee researchers looking
for a cause. He's even listening to hives for signs of distress. Beekeepers in
22 states have reported bees dying in huge numbers.
 Jeff
Pettis of the U.S. Department of Agriculture says parasites and disease have
killed bees in the past, but never anything like this.
"We went through multiple hives and we couldn't find
anything that I would even call a beehive, so it was depressing," Pettis says.
Part of the mystery is that colonies can go from active and
healthy to dead and gone within days. For beekeepers, that's a loss that stings.
They "just disappeared," says beekeeper Louise Rossberg.
"There's nothing there. There's no bees on the ground anywhere. There's just a
completely empty hive."
In just a few weeks, Rossberg has seen hundreds of her
hives go empty. "I don't know what to do," she says. "And I'm not alone."
For now, plenty of beekeepers are stacking up silent and
empty hives. But scientists are working hard to find the cause and a cure for
what's ailing the bees. After all bees do for us, it's the least we can do for
them.
© MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
More Information & Videos
Queen Bees Shown To Pass Viruses To Their Offspring
05-Jan-2007
 ARS
entomologists Yanping Chen, Jeff Pettis, Jay Evans, Anita Collins and Mark
Feldlaufer in Beltsville, Md., made the discovery by testing individual queen
bees and their offspring for deformed wing virus, sacbrood virus and black queen
cell virus.
The finding, reported earlier in 2006 in the journal Applied and
Environmental Microbiology, were discussed recently at the annual meeting of the
Entomological Society of America in Indianapolis, Ind.
The researchers examined queen feces and various tissues including hemolymph,
heads, guts spermatheca and ovaries. Tissues of gut, ovaries and spermatheca, as
well as the feces, were found to carry viral infections. In a separate study,
the virus status of queens and their offspring was examined simultaneously. Once
viruses in the queen bees were identified, the same viruses were found in their
offspring, including eggs, larvae and adult workers.
According to Chen and her colleagues, this information is invaluable for
improving understanding of the epidemiology of virus infections in honey bees.
It could be used to predict bee colonies at risk of virus infection, which, in
turn, would contribute to the development of effective disease-control
strategies.
Honey bees pollinate an estimated $15 billion worth of U.S. crops each year.
The health of honey bee colonies is continuously threatened by various
pathogens, with viruses posing an unknown risk because of lack of information
concerning transmission and outbreaks.
The Entomological Society of America, founded in 1889, has more than 5,700
members and is the largest organization of entomologists in the world. More than
2,000 entomologists and other scientists are expected to attend this year's
annual meeting.
Chen, Pettis and Evans are with the ARS Bee Research Laboratory in
Beltsville, Md. Collins, formerly with the lab, is now retired. Feldlaufer,
formerly with the lab, is now research leader of the ARS Chemicals Affecting
Insect Behavior Laboratory in Beltsville.
ARS is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific research agency.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by
USDA/Agricultural Research Service.
Science Daily — The first evidence that viruses can be
transmitted vertically from mother queens to their offspring in honey bee
colonies has been discovered by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists.
ARS entomologists Yanping Chen, Jeff Pettis, Jay Evans, Anita Collins and
Mark Feldlaufer in Beltsville, Md., made the discovery by testing individual
queen bees and their offspring for deformed wing virus, sacbrood virus and black
queen cell virus.
The finding, reported earlier in 2006 in the journal Applied and
Environmental Microbiology, were discussed recently at the annual meeting of the
Entomological Society of America in Indianapolis, Ind.
The researchers examined queen feces and various tissues including hemolymph,
heads, guts spermatheca and ovaries. Tissues of gut, ovaries and spermatheca, as
well as the feces, were found to carry viral infections. In a separate study,
the virus status of queens and their offspring was examined simultaneously. Once
viruses in the queen bees were identified, the same viruses were found in their
offspring, including eggs, larvae and adult workers.
According to Chen and her colleagues, this information is invaluable for
improving understanding of the epidemiology of virus infections in honey bees.
It could be used to predict bee colonies at risk of virus infection, which, in
turn, would contribute to the development of effective disease-control
strategies.
Honey bees pollinate an estimated $15 billion worth of U.S. crops each year.
The health of honey bee colonies is continuously threatened by various
pathogens, with viruses posing an unknown risk because of lack of information
concerning transmission and outbreaks.
The Entomological Society of America, founded in 1889, has more than 5,700
members and is the largest organization of entomologists in the world. More than
2,000 entomologists and other scientists are expected to attend this year's
annual meeting.
Chen, Pettis and Evans are with the ARS Bee Research Laboratory in
Beltsville, Md. Collins, formerly with the lab, is now retired. Feldlaufer,
formerly with the lab, is now research leader of the ARS Chemicals Affecting
Insect Behavior Laboratory in Beltsville.
ARS is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific research agency.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by
USDA/Agricultural Research Service.
More
Information
Bee Bomb Detectors
11-Dec-2006
 We
have recruited animals, from llamas to dolphins, in our fight against terrorism.
The latest strategy is to train honey bees to sniff out bombs. But if we're
going to draft bees for military action, we'd better make sure they don't
disappear.
Los Alamos scientists think they can figure out how to
harness the incredible olfactory sense of honey bees, which they use in their
search for nectar, to sniff out the explosives used in the kinds of explosives
that are used in roadside bombs in Iraq. Researcher Tim Haarmann says,
"Scientists have long marveled at the honey bee's phenomenal sense of smell,
which rivals that of dogs."
More
Information
Big Bee Emergency
23-Oct-2006
 We're losing bees
at a rapid rate, but we can't do without them. The National Research Council has
released a report stating that pollinators such as bees, birds, and many others,
who are essential to crops, food and, ultimately, all human life, are in decline
worldwide.
There is no one monitoring these vital creatures and no one
has figured out why there are fewer of them than there used to be. Honeybees are
the most threatened and we DO know what’s killing them—these bees, which are
native to the Americas, have been dying off since the 1980s, when a parasite
that is not native to this continent arrived, probably on produced shipped from
abroad. Honeybees are responsible for pollinating over 90 commercially grown
crops in the US. The danger is stark: if we lose our pollinators, we starve.
More Information
Wild Bees Make Honeybees Better Pollinators
24-Sep-2006
Science Daily — Up to a third of our food supply depends on
pollination by domesticated honeybees, but the insects are up to five times more
efficient when wild bees buzz the same fields, according to a study published
Aug. 28 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
USA.
"As honeybees become more scarce, it becomes more important
to have better pollinators," said Sarah Greenleaf, a postdoctoral researcher at
UC Davis and first author on the study.
As a graduate student at Princeton University, Greenleaf
carried out a two-year study of honeybees used to pollinate sunflower crops on
farms in Yolo County, Calif., near UC Davis.
Compared to honeybees, wild bees did not contribute much
directly to crop pollination. But on farms where wild bees were abundant,
honeybees were much more effective in pollinating flowers and generating seeds,
Greenleaf found.
There appear to be two reasons for that. Male wild bees,
probably looking for mates, will latch onto worker honeybees, which are sterile
females, causing them to move from one flower to another. Secondly, female wild
bees appear to "dive bomb" honeybees, forcing them to move. Frequent movement
between flowers spreads pollen around more effectively
Greenleaf and her co-author Claire Kremen, now a professor
at UC Berkeley, calculated that wild bees contributed about $10 million of value
to the $26-million sunflower industry alone.
All the fields in the study were conventionally farmed, but
varied in their proximity to natural habitat, Greenleaf said.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release
issued by University of California - Davis.
More
Information Source:
University of California - Davis
Don't Like Cold Food? Bees Don't Either
22-Aug-2006
 We've
learned that bees may communicate through a quantum dance. But they also know
something we don't: the color of a flower indicates how warm the nectar inside
it is. That doesn't mean much to us, but it's important to know if you're a bee,
because eating their food warm can mean the difference between life and death.
In LiveScience.com, Sara Goudarzi quotes
Lars Chittka, writing in the journal Nature, as saying that, from a bee's point
of view, "if you need to warm up, you can produce your own heat, at the expense
of some of your energy reserves— or you can consume a warm drink, and save on
investing your own energy."
Chittka randomly exposed bees to groups
of purple and pink artificial flowers, each containing the same amount of false
nectar. But so a little over half the bees went to the purple flowers first,
because they had the warmer nectar. When he reversed the nectar temperatures,
more than half the bees went to the pink flowers.
How do some flowers get warmer nectar
naturally? And do bees gradually learn which colors will have warmer nectar
inside them? Since flowers need bees to pollinate, they've gradually learned to
warm up their nectar in order to attract them. And the bees have learned which
color flowers have best succeeded in doing this.
Honey Helps Problem Wounds
27-Jul-2006
 Science Daily — 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 colleagues from Düsseldorf,
Homburg and Berlin they now want to test the experience gained in a large-scale
study, as objective data on the curative properties of honey are thin on the
ground.
The fact that honey can help wounds to heal is something that was known to
the Ancient Egyptians several thousand years ago. And in the last two world wars
poultices with honey were used to assist the healing process in soldiers'
wounds. However, the rise of the new antibiotics replaced this household remedy.
"In hospitals today we are faced with germs which are resistant to almost all
the current anti-biotics," Dr. Arne Simon explains. "As a result, the medical
use of honey is becoming attractive again for the treatment of wounds."
Dr. Simon works on the cancer ward of the Bonn University Children's Clinic.
As far as the treatment of wounds is concerned, his young patients form part of
a high-risk group: the medication used to treat cancer known as cytostatics not
only slows down the reproduction of malignant cells, but also impairs the
healing process of wounds. "Normally a skin injury heals in a week, with our
children it often takes a month or more," he says. Moreover, children with
leukaemia have a weakened immune system. If a germ enters their bloodstream via
a wound, the result may be a fatal case of blood poisoning.
For several years now Bonn paediatricians have been pioneering the use in
Germany of medihoney in treating wounds. Medihoney bears the CE seal for medical
products; its quality is regularly tested. The success is astonishing: "Dead
tissue is rejected faster, and the wounds heals more rapidly," Kai Sofka, wound
specialist at the University Children's Clinic, emphasises. "What is more,
changing dressings is less painful, since the poultices are easier to remove
without damaging the newly formed layers of skin." Some wounds often smell
unpleasant -- an enormous strain on the patient. Yet honey helps here too by
reducing the smell. "Even wounds which consistently refused to heal for years
can, in our experience, be brought under control with medihoney -- and this
frequently happens within a few weeks," Kai Sofka says.
In the meantime two dozen hospitals in Germany are using honey in their
treatment of wounds. Despite all the success there have hitherto been very few
reliable clinical studies of its effectiveness. In conjunction with colleagues
from Düsseldorf, Homburg and Berlin, the Bonn medical staff now want to remedy
this. With the Woundpecker Data Bank, which they have developed themselves, they
will be recording and evalu-ating over 100 courses of disease over the next few
months. The next step planned is comparative studies with other therapeutic
methods such as the very expensive cationic silver dressings. "These too are an
effective anti-bacterial method," says Dr. Arne Simon. "However, it is not yet
clear whether the silver released from some dressings may lead to side-effects
among children."
Effective bacteria killer
It has already been proved that medihoney even puts paid to multi-resistant
germs such as MRSA. In this respect medihoney is neck and neck in the race to
beat the antibiotic mupirocin, currently the local MRSA antibiotic of choice.
This is shown by a study recently published by researchers in Australia. In one
point medihoney was even superior to its rival: the bacteria did not develop any
resistance to the natural product during the course of treatment.
It is also known today why honey has an antiseptic effect: when producing
honey, bees add an enzyme called glucose-oxidase. This enzyme ensures that small
amounts of hydrogen peroxide, an effective antiseptic, are constantly being
formed from the sugar in the honey. The advantage over the hydrogen peroxide
from the chemist's is that small concentrations are sufficient to kill the
germs, as it is constantly being produced. As a rule much larger quantities of
hydrogen peroxide would have to be used, as hydrogen peroxide loses its potency
over time. However, in large concentrations it not only damages the bacteria,
but also the skin cells.
Furthermore, medihoney consists of two different types of honey: one which
forms a comparatively large amount of hydrogen peroxide, and another known as "lepto-spermum
honey". Leptospermum is a species of tree which occurs in New Zealand and
Australia. Honey from these trees has a particularly strong anti-bacterial
effect, even in a 10% dilution. "It is not yet known exactly why this is," Dr.
Arne Simon says. "Probably it is a mix of phenol-type substances which come from
the plant and make life particularly difficult for the bacteria in the wound."
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by
University of Bonn.
Quantum Bee Dance
21-Jul-2006
 For
70 years, scientists have known that honeybees tell the other bees in their hive
where the good nectar is by doing an elaborate bee dance. The dance of the
honeybee is one of the most intricate communications in nature. But how can a
tiny animal with only a few million neurons possibly possess all the information
needed to carry it out? The answer: it may be a quantum dance.
Scientists who study these movements
have experiemented with moving the hives closer and farther away from the food
source, then examining the resulting dances. Mathematician Barbara Shipman has
discovered that the movements of the dancing bees can be predicted by a
mathematical formula called a "flag manifold," which expresses movement in the
world of the tiny particles known as quarks. In mathematical terms, a manifold
is a basic shape. She made this discovery when she projected the six dimensions
of a flag manifold onto a two dimensional piece of paper. She was amazed to see
that she was recreating the form of the bees' dance.
It may be that the bee's brain, while it
seems simple compared to ours, actually works in a completely different, and
more sophisticated, way: it may be quark-sensitive.
Adam Frank writes in Discover.com that
scientists don't understand how honeybees, who have very tiny brains, are able
to achieve such an elaborate form of communication.
Karl Von Frisch's Dance Language and
Orientation of Bees, in which he interpreted bee dances, was published in 1965.
One of the movements he recorded bees making is what he called the waggle dance,
in which it moves in two arcs bisected by a central line. Frank writes, "The bee
starts by making a short straight run, waggling side to side and buzzing as it
goes. Then it turns left (or right) and walks in a semicircle back to the
starting point. The bee then repeats the short run down the middle, makes a
semicircle to the opposite side, and returns once again to the starting
point…The central waggling part of the dance is the most important. To convey
the direction of a food source, the bee varies the angle the waggling run makes
with an imaginary line running straight up and down…If you draw a line
connecting the beehive and the food source, and another line connecting the hive
and the spot on the horizon just beneath the sun, the angle formed by the two
lines is the same as the angle of the waggling run to the imaginary vertical
line…the bees must also tell their hive mates how far to go to get to the food.
The shape or geometry of the dance changes as the distance to the food source
changes…The closer the food source is to the hive, the greater the divergence
between the two waggling runs."
Healing Honey: The Sweet Evidence Revealed
07-Apr-2006
 Science Daily — 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 16 trials that were performed on experimental animals.
Honey was found to be beneficial as a wound dressing in the following ways:
- Honey's antibacterial quality not only rapidly clears existing infection,
it protects wounds from additional infection
- Honey debrides wounds and removes malodor
- Honey's anti-inflammatory activity reduces edema and minimizes scarring
- Honey stimulates growth of granulation and epithelial tissues to speed
healing
The review article was written by Dr. P.C. Molan of New Zealand's University
Waikato. He noted that, although the many randomized controlled clinical trials
strongly support the use the honey in wound care; the trials may not have been
double-blind. Of course, double blind testing would be difficult to achieve
because honey is a very recognizable substance.
Molan concludes, "the barrier to using honey that has existed for many
clinicians who have been constrained to using only licensed products has been
removed now that honey is available in the form of various sterile products
licensed for use in wound care. Clinicians should check the evidence that exists
to support the use of honey."
We're Losing Bees But Can't Do Without Them
18-Jul-2005
 Pesticide
levels that were previously thought to be safe for bees may actually be harmful
to them. Adult bumble bees exposed to the pesticide spinosad have an impaired
ability to forage for food. Spinosad is a natural pesticide derived from the
bacteria Actinomycetes. It's used in over 30 countries, including North America,
Canada and the UK, to combat common crop pests such as caterpillars and thrips.
Bees are important pollinators of crops. In developed countries, about a third
of human food relies on their pollination. Less dramatic effects on honey bees
could be going unnoticed, and other species could also be affected.
Bumble bees that were exposed to
spinosad during their larval development, in amounts that are the same as the
amount of spinosad they’re likely to be exposed to in nature, took longer to
find complex flowers. They bees also displayed "trembling," which impaired their
ability to land on the flowers and enter the flower tubes. Besides exposure to
pesticides, honey bees are being decimated by the varroa mite from Southeast
Asia, which has killed or severely weakened an 40 to 60% of the honeybees in the
United States during the past six months. More than 50% of the bees in
California, which pollinate the state's almond crop, have died during the past
six months.
The honeybee is the major carrier of
pollen for seeded fruits and anything that grows on a vine, from apples to
zucchini. Millions of acres of U.S. fruit, nut, vegetable, seed and legume crops
depend on insect pollination, and 80% percent of insect crop pollination is done
by honeybees. Crops that require bees for pollination are apples, avocados,
blueberries, cherries, cranberries, oranges, grapefruit, sunflowers, tangerines
and watermelon. In addition, beef and dairy products eat alfalfa, clover and
other plants that require pollination.
Honeybees are ideal for pollination
because they their hives can easily be moved to fields where they’re needed.
They also pollinate a wide variety of crops.
Honey Could Be Healthy Alternative To High-fructose
Corn Syrup In Halloween Candy
21-Oct-2004
 Science Daily — Soda, Halloween candy and other food
products that contain high-fructose corn syrup and other sweeteners could one
day get a fresh makeover using honey, one of the most ancient sweeteners,
researchers say.
Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign say that honey
may be a healthier alternative than corn syrup due to its higher level of
antioxidants, compounds which are believed to fight cancer, heart disease and
other diseases.
Honey, which contains a number of antioxidant components that act as
preservatives, also shows promise as a replacement for some synthetic
antioxidants widely used as preservatives in salad dressings and other foods,
according to Nicki Engeseth, Ph.D., associate professor of food chemistry at the
university.
Dark-colored honey, such as buckwheat honey, is generally thought to contain
higher levels of antioxidants than the light-colored varieties, according to the
scientists. Previous studies by the researchers suggest that honey may have the
same level of disease-fighting antioxidants as that of some common fruits.
The current study was presented by Engeseth Oct. 19 at the 36th Great Lakes
regional meeting of the American Chemical Society, held in Peoria, Ill. ACS is
the world's largest scientific society.
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization, chartered by the
U.S. Congress, with a multidisciplinary membership of more than 159,000 chemists
and chemical engineers. It publishes numerous scientific journals and databases,
convenes major research conferences and provides educational, science policy and
career programs in chemistry. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and
Columbus, Ohio.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by American
Chemical Society.
Honey The Darker The Better Has Potential As Dietary
Antioxidant
10-Apr-2002
Science Daily — CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Two new University of
Illinois studies are sweet news to honey lovers. One shows that honey's
antioxidant qualities preserve meat without compromising taste. A just-published
study says that honey at least based on work done on human blood in the lab
slows the oxidation of low-density lipoproteins (LDL), a process that leads to
atherosclerotic plaque deposition.
Like a UI study in 1999, researchers found in both studies that dark-colored
honey, especially buckwheat, provided more protective punch than lighter-colored
honeys. "It still is too early to say definitively, but honey seems to have the
potential to serve as a dietary antioxidant," said principal researcher Nicki
Engeseth, a professor of food chemistry in the UI College of Agricultural,
Consumer and Environmental Sciences.
The newest study published online April 6 in the Journal of Agricultural &
Food Chemistry is the first to look at honey's effect on human blood. The study
also found, using a much more precise method than the one used in 1999, that
honey's antioxidants are equal to those in many fruits and vegetables in their
ability to counter the degenerating activity of highly reactive molecules known
as free radicals.
In January, Engeseth and Jason McKibben, a researcher with Anheuser Busch in
Santa Monica, Calif., reported in the same journal that honey was more effective
than traditional preservatives (butylated hydroxytoluene and tocopherol) in
slowing oxidation in cooked, refrigerated ground turkey.
While the meat browned during cooking more extensively than traditionally
preserved products, taste was not negatively affected. For the just-published
study, Engeseth and Nele Gheldof, a doctoral student in the department of food
science and human nutrition, measured the antioxidant and phenolic contents in
honeys taken from seven floral sources.
The study covered acacia, buckwheat, clover, fireweed, Hawaiian Christmas
berry, soybean and tupelo honeys. Researchers used the oxygen radical absorbance
capacity (ORAC) assay, a tool that for the past decade has been widely used to
analyze the same components in fruits, vegetables and wines. Darker honeys had
the highest values.
"We got ORAC values ranging from 3 to 17," Engeseth said. "Commonly consumed
fruits and vegetables generally range from 0.5 to 16, based on a per gram basis.
This finding is significant, because it clearly shows that there are
antioxidants in the honey. If you ate as much honey as you did of melon, for
example, you would be getting a similar dose of antioxidants in your diet."
Is such a scenario likely? No, but the idea that honey packs healthy
quantities of antioxidants does strengthen the idea of using honey as sugar
substitute, Engeseth said.
Engeseth and Gheldof obtained blood samples from healthy human volunteers
coming off a 12-hour fast. To the blood, they added the various honey varieties
in an experiment to watch honey's impact on LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol.
In test samples, they also added copper to stimulate lipoprotein oxidation.
Using a spectrometer, they found that honey the darker the better dramatically
slowed the rate of formation of conjugated dienes, products of oxidation related
to LDL in blood.
"The one thing about this study is that even though it involved human blood
in a test-tube assay, it does show that if honey is present it can act
positively," Engeseth said.
Follow-up studies, either in progress or undergoing data analyses, will shed
more light on the exact phenolic compounds in honey and on how effectively honey
that is consumed prevents oxidation in the blood of human subjects.
Phenolic compounds are phytochemicals, which are non-nutritious compounds in
foods that may carry specific disease-fighting abilities. UI researchers also
have also found a significant correlation of phenolic content and antioxidant
capacity of honey.
Both recent studies were partially funded by the National Honey Board.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by
University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign.
Dark Honey Has More Illness-Fighting Agents Than
Light Honey
08-Jul-1998
Science Daily — CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Honey bees pollinate the
crops we eat and provide honey. Where they forage for nectar now has gained
nutritional importance: What they eat determines the level of antioxidants in
honey, according to new research.
In a study that analyzed 19 samples of honey from 14 different floral
sources, University of Illinois scientists found that honey made from nectar
collected from Illinois buckwheat flowers packs 20 times the antioxidant punch
as that produced by bees that lap up California sage. Clover, perhaps the most
common plant source tapped by honey bees, scored in the middle of the rankings.
Antioxidants substances that slow the oxidation of other substances
counter the toxic effects of free radicals, which can cause DNA damage that can
lead to age-related problems such as arthritis, strokes and cancer. Free
radicals are atoms or molecules that are usually reactive or unstable.
In an article to be published in the Journal of Apicultural Research, the
researchers say darker honey has less water and more antioxidants than
light-colored honey.
The co-authors of the study funded by the Illinois Value-Added Research
Program and National Honey Board were May Berenbaum, head of the University of
Illinois entomology department; Gene E. Robinson, director of the U. of I. bee
research facility; and plant biology graduate student Steven M. Frankel.
"Not all honeys are the same," said Berenbaum, who also is a researcher in
the U. of I. Functional Foods for Health program. "The antioxidant content of
buckwheat honey compares favorably, pretty much bite for bite, with the ascorbic
acid-related antioxidant content of tomatoes. Gram for gram, antioxidants in
buckwheat honey equal that of fruits and vegetables such as sweet corn or
tomatoes. It packs the antioxidant power of Vitamin C in a tomato, but most
people who would be willing to eat an entire tomato would balk at eating the
equivalent of a tomato's weight-worth of honey."
Honey could be a supplemental source for antioxidants, the researchers
concluded, noting that many fruits and vegetables often include other desirable
sources for antioxidants. Although honey can't replace fruits and vegetables in
the diet as a source of antioxidants, it has a lot to offer as a replacement for
table sugar, which has little value other than as a sweetener, Berenbaum said.
Depending on the floral source, honey varies widely in color, water
composition and sugar, ash, nitrogen and metal content. The U. of I. researchers
gathered and analyzed honeys produced in 1994 and 1995.
The findings could impact the beekeeping industry, which has been growing
nationwide, mostly as a hobby, Robinson said. "Bees are essential for
pollinating many of the crops that we grow for food and fiber. The estimated
value of bee pollination in America alone is $10 billion per year," he said.
"Now, honey may also take on extra importance as there may be health issues to
add to the equation. Not all nectars are created equal, thus not all honeys are
created equal."
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by
University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign. |
