Honey - Science topic

Hello Lynne. Propolis and raw honey are different hive products. Raw honey may contain small or trace amounts of propolis, but it would be negligible and difficult or impossible to extract. If you want to collect propolis from your hives, you should install a propolis trap or scrape it from the surface of the frames

Abdelkrim Rebiai

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Thanks!

can i try i will help you

You should ask someone from the locality of interest. The stock and health of the bees, the floral environment, the weather, the physical hive, competion from other colonies and the human management all influence the production of a colony. In good conditions, a colony can produce over 200 kg of honey surplus to its own maintenance, but surplus yields of less than 20 kg honey are also possible.

Hello Sunny,

It is a good question.

Essentially, the internal temperature is typically slightly higher than the ambient temperature, except within the brood area where it reaches around 33-36°C. This implies that the bottom board temperature is generally about 1-2°C higher than the ambient temperature. Indeed, the material of the hive (e.g., plastic or wood) and any insulation materials can influence this temperature.

All the best,

Hossam

Yes could be one of the solutions for conservation not only for bee species but for biodiversity in General

Jaber Amin

The extraction of DNA from the thoracic region of honey bees using the CTAB (Cetyl Trimethylammonium Bromide) method can sometimes be challenging due to the presence of various compounds that can interfere with the DNA extraction and downstream applications like PCR.

Here are some potential reasons for the observed issues and suggestions to improve the DNA extraction and subsequent PCR results:

1. Phenolic compounds:

- Honey bees, especially the thoracic region, can contain high levels of phenolic compounds, such as flavonoids, which can co-precipitate with the DNA and inhibit enzymatic reactions like PCR.

- To address this, you can try adding a higher concentration of PVP (Polyvinylpyrrolidone) or β-mercaptoethanol to the CTAB extraction buffer to help remove these phenolic compounds.

2. Polysaccharides:

- Honey bees may also contain high levels of polysaccharides, which can co-precipitate with the DNA and lead to the observed sticky or indistinct PCR results.

- To mitigate this issue, you can try increasing the salt concentration (e.g., NaCl) in the CTAB extraction buffer or including an additional precipitation step with isopropanol or ethanol to better separate the DNA from the polysaccharides.

3. Protein contamination:

- The thoracic region of honey bees may contain high levels of proteins, which can also interfere with the DNA extraction and PCR.

- To address this, you can try increasing the proteinase K incubation time during the CTAB extraction or including an additional phenol-chloroform extraction step to remove the protein contaminants.

4. RNase treatment:

- The presence of RNA in the extracted DNA samples can also contribute to the observed issues. Consider including an RNase treatment step during the DNA extraction process to remove any RNA contaminants.

5. DNA quantification and dilution:

- Ensure that you are using the appropriate amount of DNA template in your PCR reactions. Try diluting the extracted DNA samples to find the optimal DNA concentration that works best for your PCR assay.

6. PCR optimization:

- Review and optimize your PCR conditions, such as primer design, annealing temperature, and cycling parameters, to improve the specificity and sensitivity of the PCR.

7. DNA purification:

- Consider using a commercial DNA purification kit after the CTAB extraction to further clean up the DNA and remove any residual contaminants that may be interfering with the PCR.

By addressing these potential issues, you may be able to improve the quality and purity of the extracted DNA, leading to more reliable and distinct PCR results.

Hope it helps; partial credit AI

The extraction of sulfonamides from honey samples depends on several key factors:

1. Extraction Solvent: The choice of solvent is critical for efficient analyte extraction. Given the polarity of sulfonamides log Kow ranging from (-0.50 to -0.60), methanol, acetonitrile, or a mixture of the two are suitable options. The pH of the extraction solvent should also be considered to ensure sulfonamides are in their non-ionized form, typically around pH 2-3.

2. Sample Preparation: Honey's high viscosity, complex matrix (sugars, proteins, phytochemicals), and potential heterogeneity pose challenges for extraction. Sonication or incubation (30-60 minutes, at least 50°C) can facilitate analyte release and improve extraction efficiency.

3. Clean-Up: Effective clean-up is crucial to remove matrix interferences. Several methods can be employed:

Liquid-Liquid Extraction (LLE): This technique can be effective, but careful optimization is needed to avoid emulsions and ensure good recovery. Injection volumes should be carefully controlled to prevent overloading the HPLC column.

Dispersive Solid-Phase Extraction (d-SPE): This technique utilizes sorbents like primary secondary amine (PSA) or C18 powder to selectively remove matrix interferences, offering a rapid and efficient cleanup step.

However, we previously published a research paper detailing a simple and cost-effective method for the extraction and analysis of 41 antibiotics, including over 15 sulfonamide compounds, from honey. You can access the publication for a detailed methodology.

The liquid in the flowers is nectar only. Bees collect this nectar from the flowers, went to their respective hives and then convert this nectar into honey.

You may want to try ternary solvent systems such as n-butanol acetic acid water, chloroform methanol water, ethyl acetate n-butanol water, etc.

There should be a broad based antibiotic as a control.

Vishwajeet Patel You may think of using PRISMA hyperspectral data

Hello.

You can get structural information on PCs by comparing retention times and UV spectra with the literature. Please check the following books:

Campos, M.G., & Markham, K. R. (2007). Structure information from HPLC and on-line measured absorption spectra: flavones, flavonols and phenolic acids. Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra/Coimbra University Press.

Mabry, T., Markham, K. R., & Thomas, M. B. (2012). The systematic identification of flavonoids. Springer-Verlag.

Regards.

HPLC,GCMS any method can be used depends upon the facilities you have

Research objectives on honey lozenges could include determining the effectiveness of honey lozenges in treating sore throats, assessing the safety of honey lozenges, and identifying the optimal dosage of honey lozenges.

As Jorge G Pires mentionned, if you're working with images it should be a fairly easy task. See e.g. https://towardsdatascience.com/image-color-identification-with-machine-learning-and-image-processing-using-python-f3dd0606bdca

Asif Khan Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. Definitely helped me.

From my perspective, a honey "making" machine based on squeezing combs is a bad idea, to be avoided. Bees use about 10 times the amount of honey to make wax, so a system to extract and re-use honey combs significantly 1) increases productivity, reducing labour for 2) bees and labour for 3) beekeeper: win/win/win. Cost is the only downside, but good extractors are available from China at a price that cannot be reduced in a self-made device. Stainless steel is the material to use.

Hello, I think this method is benefit, which named Karl Fischer Titration

In the disc diffusion method, it is important to use a solvent that does not interfere with the antimicrobial activity of the honey being tested. One edible solvent that can be used to dilute honey for the disc diffusion method is sterile distilled water. It is a commonly used solvent in microbiology and is often used to dilute solutions and samples for testing. It is safe for consumption and does not interfere with the antimicrobial properties of honey. Besides, there are also other edible solvents including ethanol and propylene glycol, but it's important to note that these solvents may affect the antimicrobial activity of the honey being tested.

Robotic honey bees, also known as RoboBees, are small, flying robots that mimic the behavior and appearance of real honey bees. While still in the development stage, there are several potential applications of robotic honey bees in agriculture and environmental monitoring.

Compared to traditional methods, robotic honey bees have several advantages. For example, they are not affected by adverse weather conditions, they do not get tired, and they can be controlled remotely, making them ideal for monitoring difficult-to-reach areas. Additionally, they can be programmed to perform specific tasks, which could increase efficiency and accuracy. However, robotic honey bees are still in the early stages of development, and more research is needed to determine their effectiveness and potential limitations in different applications.

There are several ethical considerations that need to be taken into account with the deployment of robotic honey bees in natural ecosystems.

It is important to address these ethical considerations through careful consideration, planning, and monitoring of the deployment of robotic honey bees in natural ecosystems to ensure that their use is both effective and responsible.

Latika Yadav Could be of interest, but Honey what context exactly?

In higher tier studies I collected them via hand held vaccum pump and killed them using solid carbondioxide.

But it could be used for composting purpose I guess no idea where their fate ends.

The yeast Zygosaccharomyces rouxii is known for its high tolerance to osmotic stress, which is thought to be caused by sets of specific genes.

thanks for idea, I will check

Hello Charanakumar,

It is great to see your interest and motivation, I would recommend searching articles that you have cited in your past research and mailing the main or co-authors after reviewing their profile. It is difficult to mention any university or professors who do work on any particular domain, but once you mail them, they might reply and redirect you to more specific people who work on those areas or may have funding.

Feel free to ask anything more if you wish to know more, All the best.

Regards

Sanjana

Hi Dr.Haslina

I am interested in this topic please send me a message on my WhatsApp 00249911511696

Высокой минерализацией характеризуются падевые меда

Dear Prof. Аабу Абед ,

I have two papers related to this valuable subject:

Here are some from the first paper:

By the way, I found a company (Intko Supply ltd) in Canada that supplies 9-ODA and 9-HDA!

Thank you very much for the help Ht. Decemson and Yifei Yu ! I am searching of a way to avoid manual feeding every 2 days, maybe a product or tips&tricks to construct an automated feeder.

Pasupuleti Sivaramakrishna, Thanks for your answer.

Glenn: are you familiar with the practices of "apitherapy"? The American Apitherapy Society has many practitioners with expertise that may be applicable to your initiative. drstangaciu@gmail.com may refer you to a nearby resource.

Hello,

The estimation of a good enzymatic activity does not allow to identify the artificially added diastases.

Thus, to test the quality of a honey, the measurement of only one parameter is not sufficient anymore.

Hi Carolin,

The following empirical evaluations can be found in the literature:

"Capping of storage cells was first observed at day 12, while other studies reported a faster completion of ripening (1 to 11 days [13,14]). These differences could be explained by factors internal and external to the colony."

This is from

who cites 13

and 14

worth a read is also 8

Hope this is a starting point.

Cheers,

Richard

Hello Igor; Here is an example from my own observations. The small desert rodent Neotoma lepida (Desert Packrat) makes a large pile of sticks, bits of cactus, and other bits of vegetation. A large nest may be more than 2 m in diameter and as much as 1 m high. The individual makes a nest deep in this pile. The nest resembles that of a "typical" bird. It is dug into a platform of fine vegetation bits. The animal uses this platform as its toilet! Urine and feces are embedded in the platform and the mass ferments warming the nest by a few degrees. This is the theme in the winter when temperatures may regularly fall below freezing. During the summer the individual occupies another nest placed away from the toilet platform...it is cooler there.

Hi Violeta

We evidenced a general lack of data on bee feed quality in the Coloss Nutri Task force, and we are building a project with different laboratories to study this topic. If some of the quality parameters are already addressed, we have no specific SOP for microbiological studies. If you are willing to study this point, and if you are member of Coloss (easy membership, you could join us at https://coloss.org/projects/nutrition/)

In my lab, we are studying the composition of the bee microbiota with Maldi TOF mass spectrometer, this tool could be easily used to identify the microbial composition of bee feed. No problem to collaborate if necessary.

I suppose you used best practice for introduction. In desperate cases we use special introduction cages (https://www.wachs-hoedl.com/Zusetzkaefig-100). I might send you one in case you still need it.

This could help

thank you Ourdia Zennouche

Varroa destructor rearing in laboratory conditions: importance of foundress survival in doubly infested cells and reproduction of laboratory-born females Vincent PIOU, Angélique VÉTILLARD

Apidologie (2020) 51:968–983

Honey can reduce esophageal injury in the critical time between ingestion and when a child is able to have the battery properly removed. https://www.chop.edu/news/new-national-guidelines-recommend-ingesting-honey-after-swallowing-button-battery

Consider the source: some countries (incl Canada) check often and have an excellent record of allowing only authentic honey sales. The water test is only a measure of low water content: no assurance of purity. Pollen presence MAY indicate authentic honey, but could be faked. Hydroxymethylfurfural HMF is present in honey but also in heated syrups. Labels are (only) as good as their writers. Diastase is an enzyme in honey and economically unattractive to add to syrup, so might be an indicator of authenticity. Corn syrup (but not rice syrup) adulteration can be detected by a carbon isotope (C4 vs C3) analysis. True authenticity of honey can be got by NMR nuclear magnetic resonance (=MRS ) analysis, which requires expensive lab equipment. Such tests are being used, resulting in a reduction of fake product being shipped. Other measures like mass spectrophotometry are under development to reduce the cost.

Honey or Madhu should not be taken with warm items or not to be processed. Only one condition i.e. as Shodhana dravya as Oushadha it is given in lukewarm. Vamana Oushadha Kalpana.

I suggest you dilute the honey to have about six treatments and three replications.

Stock should be 100%,

70%, 50%, and 30%, one standard antibiotics and control treatment.

You have to thoroughly mix the honey to get uniform suspension.

Dip the docs into each treatment and air dry for 5 mins and place it on the agar.

Note: you can check literature and check the right concentrations of the honey. Can also consider the above concentrations.

Sterile distilled water should be used for the dilution.

Hi Tura,

This number is often defined in pollination contracts, that are mainly respected by the major farmers. I suggest you to collect some of these contracts among beekeepers or seed/fruit producers so you can make an estimation of the "economical need" for crop pollination.

If your question is about the "real" number of colonies necessary for crop pollination, you have to consider the landscape aroud the crops.

- if there is a largely diversified flora/fauna, and the global part of you crop in the landscape is small (<20% for instance) and if the individual surface of each crop is small (<1ha for instance), the natural pollinators will be generally sufficient.

- if your crop is the major part of your landscape, and the rest is poor for pollinators, you should bring colonies as Marian told.

Michel

There are so many factors that can influence hatchability of eggs and size plays a big role. In ostrich eggs, we found that small eggs that weighs less than 1200g are unlikely to hatch. Hatchability for small eggs is lower than medium and large eggs.

Other factors contributing to failure of fertile eggs to hatch include insufficient nutrients in the egg and exposing the egg to conditions that do not meet the needs for the developing embryo.

Please check the link below.

Take a look at this useful link.

I would call tech help at bio-rad. Are the bees all run on their own assay or do you have any results from a plate of some bees and some other amplimer showing this result or are all of the negative results on bee only plates?. If you have a bee pcr band amplified then I agree with Katie A S Burnette then this looks like a technical problem possibly something has changed the exes on the graphing so the curves cannot be seen for your bee assay or you have found a way of hiding the display for these samples so the data may be there but just not showing

Prof. Shukra Raj Paudel: "Money Speaks Louder Than Ethics"!!!???

Good to know, best of luck with your continuing research.

Hi Andreea, you cannot go with the viability test because the pollen in the honey samples are basically "dead". You might consider your methods of preparing the pollen samples and the origin of your honey samples. It is possible that during honey collection, the pollen grains get damaged.

There are plenty of articles around that investigates varying aspects of dancing patterns in Honey bees, see a few examples below, all are from 2016 and onward:

There is an error in SI graph and data expression, they are contrary.

Please see the attached document

There are a lot of caveats--whatever test you use has assumptions that your data must meet (common assumptions include normal distribution, etc.).

For a situation like this, you may look into matched pair t-tests if you are comparing two sets of dilutions.

There are many studies confirm that fungi are found in honey and beehives. So threre are many fungi considered as osmophilic or xerophilic fungi.

check this out.

Also check https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/24/7/1244/pdf-vor

Dear Sujeesh Sukumaran in addition to the useful information provided by Chinaza Godswill Awuchi please also see this interesting link entitled "USING NMR TO DETECT HONEY FRAUD":

No such information is reported, I think.

Thanks

N Das

The activity of lactic acid bacteria against bee bacterial pathogens are a subject of intensive research now and the results seem promising. Fructophilic lactic acid bacteria (FLAB) may be of special interest for the production of probiotics. Check for example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41396-019-0541-6

or

I wasn't aware bees foraged on one species per trip, but I hadn't watched them in such detail. A few other thoughts occurred to me:

You are assuming that the bees are able to unload every single pollen grain that they collect, leaving absolutely no grains inside the pollen sacs between trips. Unless it was the first foraging trip by the bee ever, I would expect to see a few different pollen grains, especially if sampled later in the day.

Considering how often you find a piece of food stuck in your teeth hours after your last meal (or is that just me?), is it realistic to think the pollen is completely emptied every time? I don't know the process by which they do it or the equivalent scale to humans:

Assuming a single species and a single size class seems to be simplifying things a bit too much. I would suggest investigating the plant species your bees are foraging on in more detail.

For sure, Adrian and various collaborators of his argued that bees locate foods solely by odours. That was around 1923.

It seems, though, like Von Frisch was the first to witness bee's communication. But you may want to read Ameisen, Bienen und Wespen: Beobachtungen über die Lebensweise der geselligen hymenopteren by John Lubbock (1899). I unfortunately couldn't find a translated version.

However in The Bee Battles: Karl von Frisch, Adrian Wenner and the Honey Bee Dance Language Controversy" by Tanya Munz in 2005, she mentions: " Von Frisch was not the first to investigate insect communication. In his 1923 paper,he already cited nine other well-known authors who’d investigated bee and antcommunication. Buttel-Reepen, 1900, 1912, 1915; Wasmann, 1909 [1899]; Forel, 1910,1924 [1874]; Lubbock, 1883."

Also check https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5442831/

I think it is because no scientists / funding organizations were not interessed by this issue. So I think that the question is not "why". I think you should ask: is it worth for somebody to study the races of honey bees present in Irak?

and my own response is a big "YEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSS"!!!!!

Why? 1- because my experience in beekeeping in some African countries taught me that the "racial" differences between regions in the same country have a high influence on the hive management and should be learnt before developping a program of rural development based on beekeeping. 2- as citizen of a Middle East country (Israel) it should be interresting to me that a colleague from a neighbooring country could find a/some good unknown races of honey bees that are adapted to the semi-desertic environments of the region, different than the A. mellifera syriaca for exemple, which is "too defensive" in her behaviour. 3- as a researcher in honey bees/beekeeping, I think we have to try to know the maximum about our honey bee characteristics and diferences to "play" with them, and be able, in particular, to use good sides to resulve some problems - for example about their health

Dear Khaled

There are several procedures for protein purification and identification. So search in the literature for one depending on the nature of your protein. The easy technique is ion-exchange chromatography on a column. Following purification, it is convenient, as the first step of characterization, to estimate the protein apparent molecular mass on PAGE, in native conditions, and denaturing conditions using SDS.

This indeed a question of insect chemical ecologist. However, reading the following may help you.

TLC, HPLC, GC-MS

What kind of PNGase F have you tested ? Have you tried PNGase F-II or Glycopeptidase A ? Take a look on Merck proposes:

https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/technical-documents/articles/biology/glycobiology/n-linked-glycan-strategies.html

I usually stick to these two enzymes and never experienced any problem.

Ethiopian medicinal honey wine

https://anuragdhyani.com/honey-wine-of-ethiopia/

Honeycomb structure provides more strength per unit mass. It has good impact absorbing quality, so it can also be used as an Impact attenuator in cars.

This paper would be helpful: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3763360/

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Please kindly visit this page:

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I obtained useful information from your reply on this RG question,

Regards for all