Draginol,

Are bee populations still crashing or has that problem been solved?  In the news I hear conflicting reports.  And what do you think the real cause was?

I got a hive last month with most of the needed gear . . I need some bees now.

There was an article on yahoo news a few weeks ago about a possible cause. Pesticides, though nothing real definitive.

That sounds far more logical and a lot less messy than the political system in America.

On a separate note: I had no idea you could get honey from a frog.

My dad, uncles, and both grandfathers kept bee hives.  What kind of bees are they?  I think my dad raised Italian (I think that's the kind, ain't it?).  It was fun watching him get the honey out of the wooden stacks and now that I think about it, I wish I'd have kept his bee keeping stuff.  Would have come in handy when I had to kill off a yellow jacket nest last year. 

So, we should start calling you ZubuzZ?

I'm interested in bee keeping. As hobby and harvest. But a family member is mortally allergic to their sting.

What are you guys raising them for? Hobby or harvest, or pollination of your fields or a clients? Or?

"Our result replicates colony collapse disorder as a result of pesticide exposures,” said Lu, who specializes in environmental exposures to pesticides (Harvard University).

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/neonicotinoids-colony-collapse/

Expect this study and topic to be trolled by those with something to lose. Bees are big business. What happens when the cause of colony collapses are unequivocally tied to commercial pesticides? Millions of dollars in lawsuits I'm sure. Loss of billions if neonicotinoids are taken off the market. And this, coming at a time when the public is clearly moving towards healthy, sustainably grown food stuffs. Monsanto and Dow and DuPont et all are taking heat.

The people speak up, the narrative changes, the market reacts. 

Case in point from earlier today... 

"Burger King vows cage-free chicken and pork"

The decision by Burger King, which uses hundreds of millions of eggs and tens of millions of pounds of pork annually, could represent a game-change in the egg and pork supply business as a huge new market has opened up for humanely raised food animals.

While some companies have been responding to consumer demand by incorporating some percentages of cage-free eggs into their purchase orders, the landslide passage by voters in 2008 of California's Proposition 2, which will ban chicken cages and gestation crates by 2015, caused buyers and suppliers nationwide to take notice. Since then studies have shown that shoppers are willing to pay more for products they believe are produced to higher animal protection standards.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47172360/ns/business-us_business/t/burger-king-vows-cage-free-chicken-pork/?fb_ref=.T5iNavdW3x0.like&fb_source=timeline#.T5igRLPDfRB

I dig honey. I dig frogs. Just don't smack the frog, honey.    

From last week: http://naturalsociety.com/monsanto-bee-collapse-buys-bee-research-firm/

Hobby/honey.  My mother got a few hives last year and my sister bought a hive and then decided she didn't want it.  The back of my yard needs a purpose . . so things happened.

The hive will be set up behind that screen, next to the creek:

(Ignore teh dirt . . I had to replace some sump pup drainage (by hand).

A few years ago I remember seeing a report on the Teev that Oz was sending a whole bunch of queens over to the US to help restore the US population [bee, that is]....

I assume that's been and done....

I miss my bees. I only had two hives that were right next to a peach orchard. I've never had better honey before or since. My bees were some type of naturalized Italians. If I remember right I captured them with the help of a beekeeping friend. I remember one time I was smoking them to do some hive checking and discovered I had used one of my grandfather's helmets (he was a logger) that had a hole in the top. I ended up with over thirty stings on my head. Ouch. I was a bad beekeeper, I never wanted to steal their honey. I was saving up to buy a small frame extractor when I had to give them up. Someday I'll have some again.

Here, we had a fungus that infected the bees. Since it was carried from hive to hive the only way to get rid of it was to kill the hive. Quite a concern for someone with only two hives. Even more so for someone with 500. It seems that anything that gets into the hive means you have to kill them.

Does beekeeping cost a lot of time? I'm interested in keeping bees myself when I'm graduated. Another question, how close can one get before the bees start to become protective of there hive and go stinging you?

Any Stardockians reading this who are at the office, I will be splitting the office hives and I have two nucs.

They have pretty definitively (now) identified a particular ingredient in a pesticide that replaced other pesticides in the 90's as the most likely primary cause of colony collapse disorder.  It messes with the bees neural systems really badly.

Here's an article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120405224653.htm

When I was a kid we had a hive swarm and end up coating the walls of our laundry room.  We called a bee keeper and he found the original colony in our carport attic.  He got over 90 US Lbs of honey from it and said the hive was so heavy it almost collapsed the ceiling.