Bee sting in most situations is life threatening. Spectrum of bee sting ranges from mild local reaction to death. The literature regarding the bee sting disease from India is sparse. The rare manifestations of the disease include encephalitis, polyneuritis, myocardial infarction, pulmonary edema, bleeding manifestations, and renal failure. Bee sting infections are rare and no field studies have...

Lithuania has old ethnomedicine traditions, consisting of many recipes with herbal, animal, and mineral original ingredients. All these findings were mostly collected in Lithuanian language, often in local community's dialects, and stored only in archives. We analyzed archival sources about honeybee and its products used for medicinal purposes dated from 1886 till 1992 in different parts of Lit...

Helicobacter pylori is recognized as the most common bacterial pathogens colonizing the gastric epithelium of nearly half of the world's population. This bacterium is the main etiological cause of gastroduodenal ulcers, and more importantly as the substantial risk factor for development of gastric cancer. The emergence and rapid increase in the prevalence of multi-drug resistant phenotypes have...

BACKGROUND The Member States of European Union are encouraged to improve the general conditions for the production and marketing of apicultural products. In Belgium, programmes on the restocking of honey bee hives have run for many years. Overall, the success ratio of this queen breeding programme has been only around 50%. To tackle this low efficacy, we organized sanitary controls of the breed...

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION IS A BALANCING ACT. ON ONE SIDE IS SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTION OF food and biobased products for a growing population. On the other is protecting our natural resources and the environment. The global decline of the honey bee, a major domestic pollinator of many crops, exemplifi es how complex the factors are that contribute to maintaining this balance. Overall bee colony decl...

The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is a swarm-based metaheuristic optimization technique, developed by inspiring foraging and dance behaviors of honey bee colonies. ABC consists of four phases named as initialization, employed bee, onlooker bee and scout bee. The employed bees try to improve their solution in employed bees phase. If an employed bee cannot improve self-solution in a certa...

Chemical plant protection is a commonly discussed factor potentially responsible for decline in pollinators and other beneficial insect populations. Various groups of chemicals including persistent organic pollutants could impact a bee colony's welfare and are reported to be present in bee tissue and apiary products. The aim of this work was to evaluate the presence of selected persistent organ...

Secreted phospholipases A(2) (sPLA(2)s) from snake and insect venoms and from mammalian pancreas are structurally related enzymes that have been associated with several toxic, pathological, or physiological processes. We addressed the issue of whether toxic sPLA(2)s might exert specific effects on the Plasmodium falciparum intraerythrocytic development. We showed that both toxic and non-toxic s...