How bees can create a sense of community
Self-proclaimed ‘head bee nerd’ Marty Hanks says bees offer a new sensory definition of home, and he’s launched the Hometown Honey Taste-off to prove it.

Best medicine for bees? Their own honey

In a study, bees that ate honey chemicals showed activation in genes that are known to help bees fight parasites and break down pesticides.

‘Honey laundering’ an international scandal

Food experts have found that much of the honey sold in the U.S. is a concoction of corn or rice syrup, malt sweeteners and a small amount of genuine honey. Worse, some honey — much of which is imported from Asia — has been found to contain toxins like lead and other heavy metals, as well as drugs like chloramphenicol.

Make your own honey syrup
Honey syrup is easy to make, and it’s a must if you’re going to be serving prohibition era cocktails at your holiday parties.

imwithkanye:

Honey, You Make Me Blue. Beekeepers near the French town of Ribeauville, which is home to a M&M’s processing plant, have noticed their bees turning out honey in unnatural shades — green, blue and dark brown among them.

Does local honey diminish allergies?
It certainly tastes fabulous, but does local honey have the power to stop itchy eyes and scratchy throats?

Thieves steal 5,000 honeybees from Houston restaurant
Talk about your daring robberies. Unidentified thieves backed their pickup truck to Haven Restaurant in Houston, Tex., before dawn on Saturday and took off with a three-foot-high, 500-pound beehive.

scinerd:

Urban Beehive

The Urban Beehive was developed as part of Philips’ new Microbial Home project, a self-sufficient closed-loop home concept that also features items like a methane digester and a plant-based effluent (read: toilet) filtration system. It’s a design concept, so it’s not exactly coming to a Home Depot near you. But it could, and maybe it should.

The Urban Beehive has two parts that attach to your apartment window: A white frontispiece with a flower pot and a small hole for bee entry, and an orange-hued glass inverted teardrop mounted inside your house. This way you can see the bees at work, and access their honey via a small spigot.

The glass teardrop has an array of honeycomb frames for bees to build their wax cells, like existing honeybee colony kits do. The shell is orange to help the bees navigate, and there’s a small hole for the urban beekeeper to release smoke inside, should the hive ever need to be opened (smoke chills out the bees). The city benefits from the bees’ pollination work, and your apartment benefits from fresh honey and the pleasing effect of watching bees, Philips says.

Article: Sleek Urban Hive Lets You Keep Bees in the Comfort of Your Apartment

White House bees deliver record crop
The single hive, which has produced a massive 225 pounds of honey this year — is apparently located in a sweet urban spot with little competition.