The Buzz Issue 4: Won't You Bee Mine

Two pure beeswax pots side by side.

Welcome to The Buzz, our monthly newsletter coming to you straight from the 🍯honeyverse🍯 featuring a wide selection of stories, articles, links, product updates and much more!

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This Month's Features:
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Honey Dew Biscuits (PDF)

Straight from the kitchen labs of John Russell Honey! (actually from one of our ✨amazing✨ team members!), a quick and easy biscuit recipe for anyone who needs biscuits in a hurry.

All Natural Aphrodisiacs Taste Better

We take a quick peek at the history behind two of the most reputed aphrodisiacs in the world.

February Fireside with John Russell

John Russell's regular State of the Hive.

Nectar Plants: The Word Search!

Where does all this honey come from 🍯 Find out right now 🌱

Question of the Month

A short and sweet piece on the lifespan of honeybees (alternative title: here for a good time but not a long time)

New Products!

A collection featuring some of the latest and greatest. Our pick this month? Valentino your personal St. Valentine's Day assistant!

News and Miscellany

New Fundraising Options!

  • As always, we're running our traditional community fundraisers this year which have produced fantastic results for schools and other organizations across Manitoba
  • New for 2023, we now offer a Gift Card Fundraiser program that's been streamlined and simplified to make fundraising as easy as possible for everyone involved! Read more here

France Rules Against Neonicotinoids

  • France had been previously circumventing EU laws temporarily due to aphid issues, but has now implemented a total ban on the use of neonicotinoids
  • Neonicotinoids have been implicated in various health issues for bees such as memory loss and paralysis
  • Read more here (Radio France Internationale)

Study: American Honeybee Lifespans Halved

  • This article from The Charlatan (an independent student operated newspaper at Carlton University, Ottawa) delves into some recent research coming out of the University of Maryland (link to the original paper published in Nature)
  • Results suggest that since 1969, the average lifespan of honeybees in the US has fallen from 34 days to 18 days
  • It's unclear how this may relate to Canadian and, in our case more specifically, Manitoban honeybees, but it is clear many of the implicated problems such as varroa mites are present in Canada

Science and Tech

Research Article: "The honey bee genome-- what has it been good for?", Springer (external link)

  • The full genome of the Western honeybee has been available since 2006
  • This article digs into the impacts and changes in understanding since the genome was published

Research Paper: "Best practices for instrumenting honey bees", Nature (external link)

  • Honeybees are a strong indicator of general overall environmental health, which can be very relevant information for research around ecological changes
  • Researchers have been adapting technologies to monitor honeybees for +70 years
  • This paper investigates honeybee tagging techniques

Research: "Researchers create an optical tractor beam that pulls macroscopic objects", Phys.org (external link)

Did You Know?

  • February: from Latin februum meaning "purification" (Wikipedia)
  • In Ancient Greece and Rome, honeybees were associated with the god of love, Eros (aka: Cupid, Wikipedia)
  • The taxonomic name for the Western (also called European) honeybee, Apis mellifera found in Canada comes from the Latin words for "bee" (apis), "mel" (honey) and "fer" (carrying or bearing)

Let us know how we did!

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