Mobile bees

Early 20th Century mobile bee hives, Weimar Bee Museum, Germany. Beekeepers have a long history of supplying bees to farmers or agriculturists to pollinate crops. These colourful bee hive boxes are conveyed on this wagon and rented out for a period of a few weeks. The brightly coloured hives can easily be seen and located in a field so the beekeeper can retrieve them easily when the bees have done their pollinating job.

In the present time, bees are showing signs of stress due to being overworked. Symptoms of stress on the bees include dieback of colonies, diseases, and susceptibility to Varoa mite parasite. Pesticides used on agricultural crops is also to blame for bee dieback. An alarming decline in honey bee (Apis Mellifera) populations worldwide will mean problems with crop production for human consumption.

Interestingly the USA has no native honey bees so bees are imported mainly from Europe to pollinate American crops.

Aschi "Freestone", 1banaan, Ronald Stachowiak, Jean have particularly liked this photo

Comments

micritter

Gorgeous photo and colors. Very interesting information. I didn't know the US has no native honey bees.

6 years ago.

Imogen has replied to micritter

Hi Thanks for the visit. The USA has lots of other native bees but Apis Mellifera or Honey Bees first came to North America with European settlement. They are the principal pollinator of commercial crops. Existing colonies of honey bees in the USA are supplemented with imported bees each year to keep farmers supplied with enough pollinators. There are a lot of problems besetting honey bee colonies today adding to the stress of maintaining numbers of bees.

6 years ago.

Jean

What an interesting series of photos on the history of beekeeping.

5 years ago.

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