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Science with a touch of honey

Image credit: EPA Hive Science Mobile App Screen Shot

HiveScience is a citizen science venture for beekeepers. Utilizing the HiveScience mobile phone-based application, beekeepers can submit hive well-being reports, Varroa bug checks, and demand units to send honey tests to EPA. This information enables them to track hive well being through nectar tests and track Varroa vermin infections continuously. It will likewise give data about effectiveness of the miticides to the EPA.

The declining health of honey bees and other pollinators is an international concern, with bees in almost every region of the planet dying from a variety of causes. HiveScience propels understanding of how Varroa parasites and different pathogens influence honey apiaries.

The application is available on both iOS and Android mobile platforms and can be downloaded for free. The application is designed for citizen science and usage is fairly simple and to the point. You are required to register an account before you can send in your sighting and that is only to make your records verifiable and reliable. Signing up for the first time is very easy and requires just a few basic details before you are all ready to go. The features of the app are completely free, making it perfect for all citizen scientist bee keepers out there.

This project is the bee’s knees

English: This is a photo of carpenter bees' nest.
A carpenter bees’ nest. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bees have been in the news a lot recently, but the buzz hasn’t been good. Entire bee colonies have been dying, and we’re hard put to figure out why. So-called colony collapse disorder (CCD) is a major problem, because bees are a critical input in our food supply chain: as well as supplying honey, they pollinate many of our crops.

Although Native Buzz doesn’t address CCD directly, it does hope to contribute to the study of bees and wasps in general, and in so doing, find other species of pollinators so that we are less reliant on the handful of bee species that are currently used in agriculture.

If you’re fascinated by bees and wasps, Native Buzz wants you to register and then buy or  build a site for solitary bees and wasps to nest in. Not only will this provide much-needed habitat for these creatures, but you’ll then be able to monitor the nests and upload your data to the project. This will help researchers learn more about species distribution and population health, and create action plans for endangered species. Plus, if you’re a gardener, your plants will benefit too.