A great blog post from beekeepers in East Tennessee giving an informative summary of the democratic behaviour of honeybees in swarming. Do bees make decisions better than humans? Read more… Check out the link to audio interview with Thomas Seeley, author of ‘Honeybee Democracy’.

An ancient mite that bit an ant’s head got locked together in amber for millions of years. The fossil is the first discovered parasite from a group whose species plague today’s ants, bees and wasps. The mite is attached to the ant’s head – a similar behaviour to modern parasitic mites like varroa, which can infest honeybees. The research was published in Royal Society journal Biology Letters, ‘An ant-associated mesostigmatid mite in Baltic amber’ (Sept 2014) by Jason A Dunlop, Jenő Kontschán, David E Walter and Vincent Perrichot: http://ow.ly/Cnp8t and featured in Nature News: http://ow.ly/Cnosi. Story sourced by Emma Sarah Tennant.

Happy Open Access Week! To celebrate Open Access Week all Royal Society Publishing content – from 1665 to current – is free to access until Sunday 26 October. Visit Royal Society Publishing’s website here.

For beekeepers this means you can search and read lots of interesting research papers about honeybees too. Remember content is free to access only until tomorrow, Sunday 25 October, so get searching for honeybee articles now!

Story sourced by Emma Sarah Tennant.

Thank you for visiting the news blog of Ealing Beekeepers. Here we’ll be posting news about bees and beekeeping and stories and experiences from our members. Please visit us soon for more news!