“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
Charles Darwin
BEING A BEE...
Bees are marvellous creatures. They survived for millions of years without the assistance of human beings. The most powerful varieties are adapted to the environment in their struggle for life under the terms of natural selection (Darwinism).
Bees are hard workers and play an important role in nature, more so than one can think or imagine. All the products of the hive are natural elixirs for humans: wax, honey, royal jelly, propolis, venom. …
In our world of fast and perpetual evolution, it is important to be able to keep the interest of rising generations in bee-keeping. Its ancestral techniques sometimes can appear exceeded, becoming a major risk factor for the perennial and the survival of agriculture. Indeed, if the number of bee-keepers is reduced more and more, how can we guarantee pollination up to now assured by bees?
At first glance, it is only one insect species which is likely to disappear, but it can become a major environmental catastrophe when it is announced. Wasn’t it Albert Einstein who had already stated that humanity would not survive more than four years with the disappearance of bees?
BioProDev S.C. is engaged with nature and is trying to help avoid the occurrence of this catastrophic scenario. For that we are building some of the first steps:
- to teach children respect for the environment
- to avoid in presenting bee-keepers as opportunists in the work of hives and to promote them as guardians of nature instead
- to develop material in making their work easier and more effective
- to show the farmers and landscape designers that bee-keepers constitute for them essential allies
Pol Goedert, bee-keeper from Luxembourg, provides us with his bees and together we designed experimental hives to test the non-toxicity of biological control agents (Ordonez & Goedert, 2002).
These applied researches are unique, extremely useful and innovative for the Luxembourg environment. Knowing that in the Grand Duchy there are about 400 bee-keepers with more or less 12.000 hives, the hope in seeing increasing numbers seems illusory. On the contrary, the future risk is being marked by a concentration of the production in the hands of a much reduced number of these workers.
To reduce the harmful input of chemical pesticides, we also investigate the effect of biological products on the environment. We are aware of the steps we have to follow for future homologation, necessary in any field trial. This is why it is of primary importance to test bio-products on non-target insects. Because of its importance on an ecological and economic level, bees are our non-target insect choice.
We normally use domestic bees for our experiments--those used in local bee-keeping—ergo, bees provide the experimental equipment for our tests.
But we must respect the social structure implied on a hive and place the bees under the closest conditions to their natural environment, hence to observe the swarm not as a whole of identical individuals independent from/to each other, but as a diffuse organization.
As a queen is a precious treasure for bee-keepers, we utilize the Queen Mandibular Pheromone (QMP) on our research with the experimental hives. The QMP-- the only pheromone chemically identified in the honey bee (Apis mellifera) queen-- making it possible to keep the cohesion of the population, to block the ovarian development of workers and to preserve the capacities of altruism of these insects.
For further information about utilization of our experimental hives please contact:
Being a Bee