We will bring you information on worldwide developments within the beekeeping industry and related agricultural news. We will present a brief introduction to events, developments and interesting news releases as they occur. Want information sent directly to your inbox? Sign up for our free newsletter!
Like neurological systems and human social groups, new research on bees offers clues to how biological collectives make choices under dynamic conditions Scientists have carefully studied the intricacies of how individual organisms live and act together in groups known as biological collectives. In “superorganisms” such as bee colonies, the interactions of the individual members add up to benefit the entire colony. Details …
BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA, July 6, 2020 — Puerto Rico’s population of African-European hybrid honey bees (AHB) are famously known for being much gentler than their continental counterparts. Now Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists and their colleagues have found that this reduced defending of the nest is determined by colony-level genetics as opposed to individual bees' DNA, according to a study …
ARS News Service By Jan Suszkiw MADISON, WISCONSIN, August 20, 2019—Bees only feast on nectar and pollen, right? Wrong. Turns out, Nature's famously busy insect isn't strictly vegan, after all. Reporting online in this month's American Naturalist, a team of Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and university scientists has shown that bee larvae (brood) have a taste for "microbial meat." ARS entomologist Shawn Steffan and his …
Asian hornets attack honey bee colonies in much of Europe. The United Kingdom doesn’t want this hungry predator feasting on their hives. They’ve set up an effective eradication program, successfully destroying the unwanted invaders on two separate incursions. New technology will make finding the nests of these voracious hornets easier. Research shows that electronic radio tags can be used to track …
Certain aromas trigger memories in humans, transporting us back in time. But how well do bees understand scent? And can they translate scent cues into a visual imprint? New research led by scientists from the University of Bristol and Queen Mary University of London demonstrates that bumble bees have keen sniffers, letting them tell flowers apart by patterns of scent. Flowers …
Understanding the concept of zero is surprisingly difficult. The honey bee has joined the ranks of dolphins, parrots, primates and preschool children, in demonstrating the ability to distinguish zero on the numerical spectrum. This finding raises questions of how a species that differs so much from humans - with fewer than one million neurons in its brain, compared to a …
Honey bee larvae develop into queen bees only when they are fed large quantities of royal jelly. But royal jelly does more than determine whether a larva becomes a queen: it also keeps her safely anchored to the roof of the queen cell in which she develops. Research published in Current Biology on March 15 explains the role that the …
Honey bees out-compete local pollinators, which play vital specialist role in plant pollination New research indicates that introduced 'alien' honey bees are competing for resources with native bees and threatening the survival of plants that rely on interactions with specific pollinators. The study, published in the journal Diversity and Distributions, was led by Dr. Olivia Norfolk of Anglia Ruskin University, who carried …