The Afroqueerized Beekeeper

positive-press-daily:

Two mosques in London have taken up beekeeping – and there are plans to encourage more to join the quest to save dwindling bee populations

When Kingston mosque in London introduced between 10,000 and 15,000 bees onto its premises last summer, the congregation was naturally quite concerned. Would it be safe? Would bee swarms gather at the mosque? Would it be dangerous for children? However, once local beekeeper Munir Ravalia explained that the beehive wouldn’t be a health and safety risk on the roof, they were pretty eager to find out more. “Once we dealt with worries about safety, lots of people were just curious about how it would all work and when they would be able to get some honey!” explains Munir Ravalia.

(click-through for full story)

laboratoryequipment:

Prices Set to Rise for Pollination-Dependent Foods

In recent years the economic value of pollination-dependent crops has substantially increased around the world. As a team of researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), the Technical Univ. of Dresden and the Univ. of Freiburg headed by the UFZ wrote in an article entitled “Spatial and temporal trends of global pollination benefit” in the open-access journal PLoS ONE the value of ecological pollination services was around 200 billion US dollars in 1993 and rose to around 350 billion US dollars in 2009. The researchers were also able to show in which regions of the world pollination plays a particularly important role and where agriculture is particularly dependent upon the pollination carried out by animals.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Prices-Set-to-Rise-for-Pollination-Dependent-Foods-042812.aspx

sticky-tires:

Pretty, pretty frame of honey