thoughtsandtalks

The Tübinger-mix consists of 10 annual flowering plant species: borage (Borago officinalis), buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum), marigold (Calendula officinalis), white mustard (Sinapis alba), coriander (Coriandrum sativum), caraway (Carum carvi), centaurea jacea (Centaurea jacea), cheeseplant (Malva neglecta), dill (Anethum graveolens) and phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia) in different proportions.
They attract a diversity of flower-visiting insects, including the honey bee and many species of bumble bees. Sequential sowings provide nectar and pollen from early summer to late autumn and fill the gaps when food for pollinators becomes scarce. Different insect species are favoured by different sowing-dates and plant species.

The Barefoot Beekeeper is a revolutionary book about ’sustainable’, chemical-free beekeeping.
The author strips away all unnecessary complication and confusion, demonstrating that ‘modern’ beekeeping methods are largely to blame for the poor state of health of the honeybee and that the commercialization of beekeeping marked the start of the disease and parasite problems that honeybees have been trying to deal with ever since.
The author advocates small-scale, sustainable beekeeping, with minimal disturbance to the bees and more time spent observing and learning from them. This book shows how you can make everything you need to keep bees yourself, using recycled materials and simple tools: you do not need to buy any additional equipment at all, nor do you need synthetic medications or other chemicals.
http://www.biobees.com/

Beekeeping goes back throughout history and was an art that was closely related to goddess worship in the ancient world. Bees are a matriarchal society, closely related to the feminine.

MELISSA - “bee” was the title given to Aphrodite’s high priestess at the honeycomb-shrine of Mount Eryx, where the Goddess’s fetish was a golden honeycomb. Pythagoreans perceived the hexagon as an expression of the spirit of Aphrodite whose sacred number was six. She worshipped bees as her sacred creatures because they understood how to create perfect hexagons in their honeycomb. In Her temple at Eryx, the priestesses were melissae, “bees” and the Goddess herself was entitled Melissa, the Queen Bee.
Seeking to understand nature’s secrets through geometry, the Pythagoreans meditated on the endless triangular lattice, all sixty-degree angles, that results from extending the sides of all hexagons in the honey comb diagram until their lines meet in the centers of adjacent hexagons. It seemed to them a revelation of the underlying symmetry of the cosmos.

The bee was usually looked upon as a symbol of the feminine potency of nature, because while creating a magical elixir, known for its preservation properties, they were also pollinating flowers, increasing plant fertility, and abundance.

(more…)

download the article: ‘Kunstenaars en Stadsbijen’
published in the book HONING, written by Karin Swiers.
click the image:

okno’s harvest day is set up as an open_lab where visitors can explore the projects conducted by artists and researchers in the open_green rooftopgardens. We will exchange ideas about the different processes of social and cultural issues related to the urban, green environment. We will share everyday procedures as cooking algorithms with ingredients forthcoming from the seasonal harvest of the connected urban gardens. We intend to explore via public discussions and onsite/online presentations the character, properties and the expressions of different natural processes.

2pm: Your hosts of the day are Olivier Meunier and Annemie Maes.
Throughout the afternoon they will give an overview of the setup of the okno gardens (materials, decisions, technology) and introduce the artistic projects -the beehive observatory, the spiral-dye, the connected domes and webcams- located in the gardens.
2:30: we start for a walk through the city to collect berries and plants for Bartaku’s mini-lab on solar cells.
4pm: workshop featuring natural dye sensitized solar cells and Preb 501, an experimental light amplifier. This arts/science research project is fused by Bartaku’s PhoEf.
4pm: workshop on absinthe-making. Various Artists will go beyond Toulouse Lautrec and create natural alchemy with local plants: Aude Thensiau - 50%.
6pm: the honeybee observatory by Christina Stadlbauer.
Spring 2009 the 2 honeybee colonies arrived at the connected rooftop gardens. The ladies enjoyed a rich season of urban blooms and rewarded us with the first harvest! A taster of urban beekeeping techniques and a view on the harvesting fields will be offered as well as some spoons to evaluate the city honey of Brussels.

Across workshops and presentations samples of homemade bio products can be savoured: pickled russian cucumbers, sundried tomatoes, pinjur, city honey, absinthe, blueberry wine, kosovar pita, courgette-soup, … Bring your recipies to share them with us!

Colony collapse disorder (CCD) or sometimes honey bee depopulation syndrome (HBDS) is a phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or European honey bee colony abruptly disappear. While such disappearances have occurred throughout the history of apiculture, the term colony collapse disorder was first applied to a drastic rise in the number of disappearances of Western honey bee colonies in North America in late 2006. Colony collapse is economically significant because many agricultural crops worldwide are pollinated by bees. European beekeepers observed similar phenomena in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, and initial reports have also come in from Switzerland and Germany, albeit to a lesser degree while the Northern Ireland Assembly receives reports of a decline greater than 50%. Possible cases of CCD have also been reported in Taiwan since April 2007.
The cause or causes of the syndrome are not yet fully understood, although many authorities attribute the problem to biotic factors such as Varroa mites and insect diseases (i.e., pathogens including Nosema apis and Israel acute paralysis virus). Other proposed causes include environmental change-related stresses, malnutrition and pesticides (e.g. neonicotinoids such as imidacloprid), and migratory beekeeping. More speculative possibilities have included both cell phone radiation and genetically modified (GM) crops with pest control characteristics, though experts say no evidence exists for either assertion. It has also been suggested that it may be due to a combination of many factors and that no single factor is the cause.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder