Honey Ray NEW!

Collective foraging in honey bees is performed by a subset of workers: some forage for nectar, while others forage for pollen. Some bees leave the hive early in the day to scout for new resources, while others leave the hive in response to active recruitment by scouts or other foragers (Lemanski et al., 2019). Honey bees communicate the distance and direction of nectar and pollen sources, by body movements, called waggle dances (something I will explore in another blog as it is such a fascinating subject!?). Honey bees also collect water in order to regulate the hive temperature in hot conditions.

honey ray

Machado De-Melo, A. A., Almeida-Muradian, L. B. D., Sancho, M. T., & Pascual-Maté, A. (2018). Composition and properties of Apis mellifera honey: A review. Journal of apicultural research, 57(1), 5-37.

Thank you for refreshing my knowledge of honey production. A combined annual distance of 15 million km (spent on the beeline, so to speak) is really remarkable. Looking forward to your waggle dance blog. ????

Ray Tousey in Germantown, NY is a critical part of the Hudson Valley food scene, his 300 hives are responsible for pollinating most of the orchards on the east side of the Hudson River, his honey is deeply flavorful, floral and always raw! His honey comb, which we bring down in the original racks that the bees produce it in, is a killer centerpiece for a cheese plate. It is delicious to boot!

Sweet honey and smoky chipotle peppers combine for a complex and tangy taste delivered with SBR's signature thickness. Do your tongue a favor and slather this sauce (our spiciest yet) onto your next snack.

Honey Buzzard is the only migratory raptor we can still see circling leisurely up in the sky over the forests, tea-estates and villages of Bangladesh. By spreading its large wings it can stay aloft effortlessly on the warm air perpetually pushing upwards. And while up in the sky enjoying the warming sunshine it keeps an eye over the movement of its favourite insects such as honeybees, hornets, wasps and cicadas.

Honey Buzzards inspects the earth mostly to check the traffic of aerial insects such as honeybees and hornets etc. As the very name suggests the Honey Buzzard loves to feed on honey, honeycomb and the larvae of bees, wasps and hornets. While buzzing across the sky the honest honeybees disclose their home-addresses unwittingly; and the wicked wasps and the haughty hornets do that quite arrogantly.

While most mortals including humans avoid the bees, wasps and hornets for their poisonous stings, the Honey Buzzards pursue them and attack their nests with impunity and steal the honey and the larvae. The dense feathers, thick skin around the eyes and the armoured toes protect them against the most formidable stings in the world. Besieged bees, wasps and hornets swarm a Honey Buzzard for nought.

Feathers of the Honey Buzzard are also covered with some white filaments that are believed to deter the stinging insects from settling on those. This makes the other birds such as honeyguides and the mammals such as bears envious of the Honey buzzards for evolving that additional chemical defence and gaining an edge over them in the business of raiding with impunity the colony of insects with stings.

We once saw a Honey Buzzard descend on a honeycomb hanging from a windowsill of a building in the Jahangirnagar University campus. The bird took a large part of the comb where the honey was stored and gluttonously guzzled on the honey as well as the comb. The ferocious beers, of course, attacked the bird and crawled all over its body in their vain attempts to find a place to jab in their stings.

The bees continued to swarm the Honey Buzzard even after it finished its banquet of beeswax dunked in honey. The bird sat calmly on a Mahogany Tree; and we continued to squat in the nearby bush wishing the bees to return to their nest and letting us come out in the open to photograph the bird. We knew that the angry bees would attack us if we stirred too early; and no part of our body is protected against bee stings.

Understandably, the stinger insects more often attack the honey-harvesters than the bird-photographers. In Indonesia the honey-hunters blamed the recurrent attacks by the giant honeybees on the roguish buzzards. The honey-hunters believed that after attacking the honeycomb, a wicked Honey Buzzard deliberately flies over the people in the forest to let the bees pursue them rather than the bird.

The increasing allegations of the honey-hunters of Indonesia were not left uninvestigated. Scientists studied those and found no proof of any attempt of a Honey Buzzard being pursued by the bees to fly more often towards the people in the forest. They concluded that the people in the forest were attacked more often by the giant bees because more people were entering the forests more often than before.

We, however, would not blame a Honey Buzzard even if it quite intentionally brought a horde of furious bees to a group of honey-hunters. The bees have survived the attacks of Honey Buzzards for crores of years; but are on the verge of complete collapse from human attacks, in only a few centuries. 041b061a72