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☆ Honeybees Invaded My House, and No One Would Help
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-30 | by ( Sarah Kliff | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Responding to fears of a “honeybee collapse,” 30 states have passed laws to protect the pollinators. But when they invaded my house, I learned that the honeybees didn’t need saving. I noticed the first bee one afternoon as my dog gleefully chased it around the house. When the pest settled on a window by the stairwell, I swatted it with a cookbook and cleaned up the mess. When I heard a loud droning coming from inside a wall next to my son’s bed, the ominous situation finally hit me: The house was infested.

WASHINGTON (AP) — When a total solar eclipse transforms day into night, will tortoises start acting romantic? They previously detected other strange animal behaviors in 2017 at a South Carolina zoo that was in the path of total darkness. This year’s full solar eclipse in North America crisscrosses a different route than in 2017 and occurs in a different season, giving researchers and citizen scientists opportunities to observe new habits. After the 2017 eclipse, he analyzed data from tracking devices previously placed on wild species to study habitat use. So do feral horses, “probably taking cover, responding to the possibility of a storm out on the open plains.”The last full U.S. solar eclipse to span coast to coast happened in late summer, in August.

Persons: ”, Adam Hartstone, Siamangs, gibbons, “ It’s, Jennifer Tsuruda, Tsuruda, of Alberta's Olav Rueppell, Nate Bickford, “, Andrew Farnsworth, Raffaela Lesch Organizations: WASHINGTON, Fort Worth Zoo, North Carolina State University, University of Tennessee, of Alberta's, Oregon Institute of Technology, Cornell University, University of Arkansas, Associated Press Health, Science Department, Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science, Educational Media Group, AP Locations: Texas, South Carolina, Columbia , South Carolina, Hartstone, Little Rock , Arkansas, Toledo , Ohio, Indianapolis, North America

☆ A Year of Upheaval on Abortion’s Front Lines
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-20 | by ( Kate Kelly | Marisa Schwartz Taylor | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +14 min

Erica’s pilots that day were volunteers with Elevated Access, a nonprofit set up last year to help people obtain abortions, often across state lines. In North Carolina, an anti-abortion, church-backed pregnancy center called Mountain Area Pregnancy Services confronted a harassment incident. Before Dobbs, the group’s abortion services operated on a budget of $20,000 per month. But the dearth of pharmacies willing to offer abortion medication meant that Honeybee soon became the main provider of the online-ordered, home-delivered pills. Abortion medication — which now accounts for more than half of abortions in the United States — produces roughly 40 percent of Honeybee’s revenue.

Persons: Wade, Health “, ”, Maren Hurley, Hey Jane, Jenice Fountain, Julia Rendleman, The New York Times Erica, ” Erica, Erica, Andy, “, Gabriela Bhaskar, Dobbs, Kelsea McLain, Roe, —, McLain, Yellowhammer, Fountain, Mike Belleme, Court’s Dobbs, Jeff Porter, Porter, ” Michelle Fenton, Ms, Fenton, Sharon Chischilly, Paddy, Rachael Lorenzo, Tracy Nguyen, Honeybee, Jessica Nouhavandi, Nouhavandi Organizations: Jackson, Health, Private, Yellowhammer Fund, The New York Times, Maryland —, D.C, Cessna, Fund, Birmingham, Pregnancy Services, The New York, Services, The New York Times Indigenous, Roe, Los Angeles Locations: Dobbs v, North Carolina, Hurley’s, Alabama, Louisiana, America, Minnesota, Twin Cities, Illinois, Maryland, Washington, Wisconsin, Birmingham, Ala, Asheville, N.C, Waynesville, New Mexico, Oklahoma , Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Culver City, Calif, Roe United States, United States

☆ Rise in Sightings of Honeybee Swarms Has U.K. Beekeepers Scrambling
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-31 | by ( Isabella Kwai | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The sight is one that beekeepers say is understandably intimidating to the ordinary person out for a walk: a sliver of sky suddenly darkening amid the collective roar of thousands of honeybees before they cluster on branches or bushes. In Britain, the behavior, known as swarming, typically takes place from May to July and is a natural process in which a honeybee colony splits in half and leaves with a queen bee in search of a new home. But the country is currently experiencing a greater numbers of sightings for this time of year, most likely thanks to unseasonably warm weather that followed a cold, wet spell. As a result, beekeepers and pest-control workers who catch the swarms are reporting a surge in calls for their help as members of the public spot the clusters in backyards, in chimneys and even on barriers along city streets. “We’re fully booked for the next four weeks,” said Rob Davies, a pest controller in Shropshire, in central England, who specializes in dismantling and rebuilding structures like chimneys to rescue honeybees, adding that he was getting “ridiculous” volumes of people calling for assistance.

Persons: We’re, ”, Rob Davies Locations: Britain, backyards, Shropshire, England

☆ World Bee Day 2023: 6 surprising things about bees
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-20 | by ( Katie Hunt | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

Unfortunately, many bee species are under threat as a result of changes in land use, pesticides, intensive agriculture and climate change — but there are steps you can take to help them thrive. In honor of World Bee Day on May 20, here are six surprising things you might not know about nature’s hardest-working pollinators. “It marks the first report of honey bees of any species foraging for materials that are not derived from plants or water-based fluids. It is also the first clear-cut example of honey bees using a tool in nature.”Honeybees also signal an imminent attack by making a chilling warning noise. Bees are seen on a honeycomb cell at the Urban Bee Hive rooftop site in Woolloomooloo, a suburb of Sydney.

☆ Bezos' Blue Origin wins NASA astronaut moon lander contract to compete with SpaceX’s Starship
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Michael Sheetz | In Michaeljsheetz | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

WASHINGTON — Jeff Bezos has his NASA moon ticket. The billionaire's space company Blue Origin won a key contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Friday to develop a crewed lunar lander for delivering astronauts to the moon's surface later this decade under the agency's Artemis program. NASA's contract award is worth just over $3.4 billion, officials said Friday, while Blue Origin Vice President John Couluris said the company will contribute "well north" of the contract's value as well. "We're making an additional investment in the infrastructure that will pave the way to land the first humans on Mars," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in announcing the Blue Origin award. Bezos said in a tweet Friday he's "honored to be on this journey with @NASA to land astronauts on the Moon — this time to stay."

☆ NASA taps Blue Origin to join SpaceX in building lunar landers
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-19 | by ( Jackie Wattles | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +4 min

Blue Origin will develop its lunar lander alongside partners Lockheed Martin, Draper, Boeing, Astrobotic and Honeybee Robotics. Altogether, the price tag for Blue Origin’s lunar lander development program is likely worth more than $7 billion. Blue Origin has been fighting for a role in the Artemis lunar lander contracts — called Human Landing System — for years. A judge ultimately ruled against Blue Origin, though NASA later pledged to expand the number of companies with lunar lander contracts to two. NASA said from the beginning that it hoped to have more than one company working to develop lunar landers capable of carrying humans.

☆ A Sweeping Family Saga of Breaking and Mending
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( Eleanor Dunn | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

GLASSWORKS, by Olivia Wolfgang-SmithI smashed a bottle while reading Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s debut novel, “Glassworks.” I had the book in one hand and a container of hair oil in the other, and the bottle slipped, ricocheted off the sink and shattered. “Glassworks” is a panoramic family saga told in four novellas, each peering over the shoulder of the preceding generation. We follow Agnes in 1910; her son, Edward, in 1938; his daughter, Novak, in 1986; and Flip, the daughter of a woman Novak loves, in 2015. The book opens with Agnes Carter, a wealthy donor to a Boston university, who hires Ignace Novak, a naturalist and glassblower, to create scientific models. When Ignace is stung by a honeybee, the pair retrieve its squashed carcass and Agnes starts to draw it.

☆ Why royal jelly is so expensive
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-16 | by ( Pj Rickards | Claudia Romeo | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: 1 min

Royal jelly is a secretion honeybee workers make to feed larvae of future queen bees. All bees consume royal jelly, but once a queen is selected, workers then feed on pollen and honey, while only the queen feeds on the prized jelly. Royal jelly contains much more nutrients than honey and is often referred to as the "superfood of the beehive." Royal jelly can be found in its natural form, as a health supplement, and in skincare products, and it can reach $125 per pound. But extracting royal jelly requires great precision, as the process can be done only by hand.

☆ BeeHero: 2023 CNBC Disruptor 50
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-09 | by ( Cnbc.Com Staff | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Enter agtech startup BeeHero with a solution. Last December, BeeHero snared $42 million in a Series B round led by impact growth fund Covent Capital in Amsterdam. But BeeHero is not the only startup providing honeybee pollution services, a market estimated by the USDA at $320 million annually. Last year, Limor Farchy, who previously worked at two acquired Israeli tech startups, was recruited as CFO. The agtech startup supplies several top almond growers in California and expects to expand to other crops that rely on pollination.

☆ Virtual Clinics Have Been a Fast-Growing Method of Abortion. That Could Change.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Claire Cain Miller | Margot Sanger-Katz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A nascent but rapidly growing industry of abortion providers administers abortions only through telemedicine, with no physical clinics. A federal court ruling Wednesday that aims to ban the mailing of abortion pills could make it much harder for them to operate. Honeybee, which fills the prescriptions for most of them and is the largest mail-order pharmacy for abortion pills in the United States, said it would continue to mail the pills to the 24 states where it’s allowed. “As a licensed pharmacy, we abide by the F.D.A.’s policies and regulations,” said Jessica Nouhavandi, co-founder and president of Honeybee. Rulings in the lower courts, if they go into effect, could severely limit the availability of the drug, including allowing it to be administered only to patients in a doctor’s office.

☆ The only thing Elon Musk understands about Twitter is how to kill it
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-21 | by ( Adam Rogers | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +15 min

Biologists, anthropologists, and information theorists do think that social networks, like Musk's bird app, show at least some signs of being flocks. "Elon's tweet is basically espousing the invisible hand of social behavior," Bak-Coleman says. In this construction, a social network might have become a collective superintelligence, had capitalists left it to its — our? Under Musk, Twitter has entered the dance-off phase. I'll be sad if the Twitter superintelligence starts singing a Kubrickian cover of "Daisy" and implodes into a pile of melting isolinear chips.

☆ This biotech startup is developing a vaccine for honeybees. Check out the 16-slide pitch deck Dalan Animal Health used to raise $3.5 million.
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-26 | by ( Riddhi Kanetkar | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

A biotech startup that is developing a vaccine for honeybees has just raised $3.55 million. Check out the 16-slide deck used to raise the fresh funds. A startup that has created a vaccine to protect honeybees against American Foulbrood, a bacterial disease that threatens bee colonies worldwide, has raised $3.5 million in fresh funds. Dalan Animal Health, founded in 2018 in Georgia, US, aims to ease beekeepers away from "unsustainable" treatments such as antibiotics. Check out the 16-slide deck used to raise the fresh funds.

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