Posts By: Peter Brezny

It’s just deer corn, treated seed won’t hurt anybody right?

While it would be easy to draw that conclusion from these inaccurate assumptions: people aren’t going to eat it it doesn’t even have flowers, bees won’t get hurt right? it’s not like we’re spraying anything   Here’s the problem: If those deer get shot and eaten, humans will likely receive low-dose pesticide exposure, and research… Read more »

Crushing bees weakens colony strength

Another article worth reading from Randy Oliver’s scientificbeekeeping.com: http://scientificbeekeeping.com/does-the-crushing-of-bees-affect-colony-health/   He poses the question, found in the URL above, “Since I couldn’t find a single controlled study in which the effects of the crushing of bees in the hive was clearly determined, I decided to use some of your donations to run a trial…”  and… Read more »

Backyard Bioshelter

This hoop house made from wood caught my eye.  Pretty amazing that even in their northern climate, they can keep the green house above freezing completely from passive solar design.  Check it out: https://permaculturegreenhouse.com/  

A few links regarding pesticides and bees.

When French Beekeepers first saw evidence of insecticide poisoning immediately after the release of neonicotinoid insecticides in the 1990’s (what we now call CCD in the US), rumor has it that the beekeepers took their empty hives to Bayer Crop Science headquarters in Lyon, threw them over the locked gate, and set them on fire… Read more »

Insecticides at undetectable levels impact Honey Bee health

The take home message in the article linked below: “The finding that individual bees with undetectable levels of the target pesticide, after being reared in a sub-lethal pesticide environment within the colony, had higher Nosema is significant.” Pesticide exposure in honey bees results in increased levels of the gut pathogen Nosema http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00114-011-0881-1 Authors: Jeffery S. Pettis,  Dennis vanEngelsdorp, … Read more »