That's no Bee BBC

Whilst browsing the web at work and catching up on the world's events a few weeks ago I was surprised to find the Taliban make money from honey sales. Yep, they keep bees just like myself, Steve Vai and Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Who'd've thought it? It's mentioned in a page called Taliban expert view: Money from honey.

I'm assuming the 'expert' isn't an entemologist because the 'bee' in the photo accompanying the article definitely wasn't a bee. The huge faceted eyes are the first giveaway, too big for a worker, too small for a drone and too visibly faceted -bee eyes look shiny to us. The shape of the  back is wrong too, and it's only got two wings whilst bees have four. The first tergite looks to have some light brown marking suggesting it's a drone fly, Eristalis Tenax, which is a European member of the hoverfly family. Not only do they not make honey but I very much doubt they live in Afghanistan either.

You might make money from honey, but you won't get honey from that.

I messaged the BBC News Facebook page back on the 1st October to point it out, the message was read a couple of days later but there was no response ..so I sent a message via the BBC Complaints page. They responded eventually but seemed strangely reluctant to acknowledge they'ed posted the wrong insect:

"This photo was only included to generally illustrate this aspect of Taliban fundraising but we take your broader point and have changed it to an image which more clearly shows bees making honey."

I'm not sure how they're suggesting a photo of what was probably a European Hoverfly sunning itself illustrated fundraising through honey sales but they have now changed the image to one showing actual honey bees.

Honey Bees! They fixed it.

A more pedantic person might  point out that these bees are probably not actually making honey as they're standing on brood comb, brood comb with a fairly patchy laying pattern but I think it's close enough.

Bees on the box

Been watching some honey bee related programs.

Recently the BBC Two's Natural World series showed an episode called Queen of the Savannah which followed the fortunes of a colony of African honey bees and a herd of elephants. Not having a TV I watched it on the internet, by the time of writing it's probably no longer on BBC iPlayer unfortunately but it's probably still up on youtube -or for those naughty people who aren't adverse to a illegally downloading copyrighted material it can be donwloaded as a torrent from Pirate Bay or for the more careful pirates who use newsgroups instead there's an NZB file for it -not that I'm advocating, endorsing or reccomending illegally downloading copyrighted content of course. Afterall according to the entertainment industry illegal downloading is killing the entertainment industry, some may say it's the mediocre dross being pumped out by the  industry that's doing the real damage ..but that's a whole nother arguement waaaaay outside the scope of this blog.

So back to the Queen of the Savannah. Unlike our bee colonies which will set up a colony at a site and remain there as long as the site remains african honey bees are migratory (which I didn't know) and move to keep up with changes in forage availability. It starts with a queenless colony living in an acacia tree and follows the bees raising a new queen, being harvested by a local honey hunter, swarming, a stint doing elephant guard duty in a bee fence, and eventually migrating to a forest area. It contains some amazing footage of inside the colony filming what goes on on the comb itself, a Queen hatching, the waggle dance (of course), the short battle between two queens and lots of bees going about their housekeeping. What is a little misleading is that the program omits to mention that all that activity takes place in near darkness and the bright light it's filmed in was added for the benefit of the camera. The programme then goes on to the situation of honey bees in Britain and their urban resurgence.

The BBC made another decent documentary about bees back in 2009 called Who Killed The Honey Bee? about the dissapearance of the bees. It follows some of americas large scale beekeepers trying to understand Colony Collapse Disorder and the mysterious dissappearances of millions of bees. It was repeated last year and you can probably find a torrent to download the program with or find it on YouTube. The programme is actually renarrated and re-edited footage from the full length american documentary film Vanishing of the Bees. An interesting film for anyone interested in bees but probably overly long for anyone who isn't, and the narrator sounds like some kind of wierd female robot which grates after about half a minute. Apart form a few beekeeping players and pundits edited out of the BBC documentary this film also mentions the import of cheap dodgy honey blended with various syrups exported from China and marketed as honey in the western world.

*Spoiler alert* in case you were wondering the biggest suspects for Colony Collapse Disorder seem to be pesticides and monoculture.