TMC MP Mahua Moitra has alleged that BJP supporters attacked her office in Krishnanagar by hurling eggs, stones and shoes while she was meeting party workers. The MP also claimed that personnel from the West Bengal Police were present but did not intervene during the incident.

Videos shared on social media show protesters outside the office allegedly throwing objects, while another video recorded by Moitra from inside the building captures eggs striking the glass windows. In the footage, the TMC leader questions the police response and accuses BJP workers of carrying out the attack.

The BJP’s response to these allegations was not available at the time of reporting, and the claims have not been independently verified.

Stay tuned to Viora News for the latest political developments and breaking news.

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The post Mahua Moitra Alleges BJP Workers Attacked Krishnanagar Office; Eggs, Stones & Shoes Hurled appeared first on MASSIVE News.

Australia has never had an outbreak of this H5N1 strain of bird flu, which first emerged in Asia about three decades ago. Until this month, we had famously been the last continent on Earth deemed free of the virus.

So, how are we preparing to deal with a possible outbreak? And if one happens, what could it mean at the checkout for the price of chicken, eggs and other poultry products?

If there was a major outbreak in Australia, meaning no country’s poultry industry could be declared free of the virus, the business case for using the vaccine would likely change.

As a consumer, it remains safe to eat poultry meat and eggs if you’ve handled and cooked them properly. If there remain no confirmed cases yet in commercial facilities, there will be no impact on the supply or prices of egg and poultry meat.

Locking down

So, you might be surprised to learn that not only are Australia’s commercial flocks not vaccinated for bird flu, but this vaccine isn’t permitted for use in Australia except in very limited circumstances.

After being detected for the very first time in two seabirds in Western Australia less than a week ago, the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu has also arrived in a second state – with a case confirmed in South Australia.

Australian authorities have had a long time to prepare for a possible outbreak and develop plans which are now being put into place. This included “Exercise Volare” in 2024, which brought together government departments and senior industry leaders to plan for different potential scenarios of an outbreak of this virus.

A severe outbreak wouldn’t just mean the possible deaths of millions of birds (either from the virus itself or due to culls to contain it). It could also lead to export bans on Australian poultry products and create huge costs for producers to decontaminate affected farms, despite government support.

Most recently, from mid-2024 through to early 2025, poultry farms in Victoria, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory faced an outbreak of multiple strains of the H7-type bird flu. The main difference with H5 is that these H7 variants have never been linked to mass wild bird deaths or mammalian cases, including people.

• limiting who can visit farms
• not allowing workers to keep backyard chooks or other birds at home
• not allowing staff to work across different poultry facilities in a short window of time
• strict control at the entrance of every farm, which may include showering and usage of a company’s clothes
• implementing measures to deter wild birds and to control rodent and insect populations.

These measures are on top of routine biosecurity measures for poultry farms, which typically include:

Have we been here before?

Since 2022, the US has been dealing with a severe outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza. More than 200 million birds have died, either from the disease itself or due to being culled.

The playbook for dealing with H5N1 would be very similar. But the stakes and uncertainties are higher, because this strain is deadlier and can infect a broader range of animals (and therefore spread more easily).

For humans – especially those who don’t come into close contact with infected animals – the risk of getting sick is low. But Australia’s multibillion-dollar poultry sector is on high alert.

Australia’s commercial chicken flocks are routinely vaccinated for a range of common diseases. And a vaccine exists for the H5N1 strain of bird flu.

Lessons from the US

Read more:
Bird flu has spread to two Australian states. Here’s how it could accelerate our extinction crisis

It’s no guarantee of what would happen here, but looking to the United States provides an illustration of how devastating an H5N1 outbreak can be.

It’s important to emphasise that at this stage, H5N1 has not been detected in any commercial poultry farms or native and endemic wild birds in Australia.

What about vaccination?

But Australia has successfully dealt with outbreaks of other bird flu strains in the past, which at the time dampened production of chicken meat and eggs.

The main reason for this is that Australia has sought to maintain our “free without vaccination” status for bird flu, which allows us to export poultry products freely anywhere in the world.

Right now, it’s reasonable for Australia’s poultry farmers to be highly vigilant. But we shouldn’t get carried away and panic.

The H5N1 strain is highly lethal to chickens, as well as turkeys and quail. Other birds grown commercially, such as ducks, can also be infected, but are more of a concern because they can be “silent carriers” of the disease, sometimes able to spread it without symptoms.

No need to panic

Inghams, for example, Australia’s largest poultry producer, has locked down its operations in WA, blocking non-essential access to farms.

H7 was declared successfully eradicated by July 2025. But this achievement required the culling of more than 10% of Australia’s egg-laying chicken flock or some 2.4 million birds. Production fell and egg prices rose sharply.

That’s because at this stage, the industry’s priority is protecting flocks from exposure to wild birds as much as possible.

Inghams is also seeking a “regional housing order” from the federal government’s chief veterinary officer, which would allow it to bring its free-range flocks indoors.

The post How is the Australian poultry industry preparing for a possible outbreak of bird flu? appeared first on MASSIVE News.

So, the mere presence of flowers doesn’t necessarily mean the bees are getting nutritionally adequate food.

This matters because climate change is altering both the quantity and nutritional composition of pollen and nectar. At the same time, what nutrition the bees need is likely shifting, too. This creates rapidly moving goalposts – it’s increasingly difficult for bees to find and consume the right nutrients they need to reproduce, develop and survive.

In our new paper published in Current Opinion in Insect Science, we argue these changes are unlikely to affect all bees equally. Currently, most of what we know about bee nutrition comes from highly social species such as honeybees or bumblebees.

Yet most bees, including many native Australian species, are solitary or communal (group living but with no queens and workers). They might experience the nutritional landscape and nutritional stress in very different ways.

Understanding these differences is crucial for predicting which bees are most vulnerable under climate change.

Not all bees will encounter nutritional stress

One way to better understand vulnerability to nutritional stress is to think about the traits that shape how different bees interact with their environments. These include:

• how far they can forage
• how flexible their diets are
• whether they live alone or in groups
• how large those groups tend to be.

These traits can influence whether bees even encounter nutritional stress in the first place.

For example, a species with a large foraging range and a broad diet might live in a nutritionally poor landscape, but still be able to travel far enough, or combine pollen from different flowers, to meet its nutritional requirements. In contrast, species with narrower diets or shorter foraging ranges might have fewer opportunities to balance their diets.

Native stingless bees, such as Tetragonula carbonaria, generally forage over shorter distances than honeybees. This could make them more dependent on the nutritional quality of nearby flowers and more vulnerable to a changing climate.

Living in a group may help a little

Once nutritional stress occurs, other traits will determine how this stress is buffered and absorbed.

T. carbonaria, for instance, live in colonies with workers that collect food and share resources. This kind of social organisation can buffer short-term changes in the environment. Even if their foraging range is small, and one floral resource declines for a season, a colony might be able to shift foraging effort, draw on stored resources, or distribute food among nestmates and brood.

But despite potential buffering, poor nutrition can still impact social species. This can show up as fewer offspring, slower colony growth, smaller workers, weaker immunity, or reduced ability to cope with other stressors, such as heat or pesticides.

Solitary bees might have fewer safety nets

Solitary bees, by contrast, will likely face different problems when it comes to nutritional stress. Many native bees, such as blue banded bees (Amegilla chlorocyanea, pictured below), don’t benefit from the support of a colony.

A single female must find a nest, collect pollen, lay eggs and provide food for her offspring. Under predictable conditions, this can be a very effective way of interacting with the environment.

However, if the right flowers are missing, bloom too late, or produce pollen containing different nutrients to what the bee has evolved to expect, the effects could be more immediate: fewer nests, smaller offspring, fewer daughters and lower chance of survival.

In these species, the condition of one female can shape the next generation, so poor nutrition might lead to rapid population declines. This means the timing and quality of floral resources are likely to be especially important for many of our native bees.

How we can help our native bees

To accurately predict how species respond to climate change, future studies will need to connect floral nutrition with bee performance in real landscapes. Most importantly, we need to include a diverse range of bees with different social lives and traits in these studies.

For now, there are still practical steps we can take to support our native bees at home. Rather than simply planting more flowers, we need to be more deliberate about what we plant.

Native plants are of course important, but we should plant them in diverse mixes, to account for variability in nutritional availability and timing.

The same applies to nesting habitats. Many native bees will not use a hive or a bee hotel. Some need bare or lightly disturbed ground; others use stems, wood or existing cavities.

So avoid the urge to over-manage every patch of ground – leave some bare earth and dead branching stems in your roses and other plants. This will make your garden or landscape more useful to more bees, so we can help support them in this rapidly changing world.

The post Most bees are solitary and don’t live in hives. Climate change risks them starving appeared first on MASSIVE News.