Entice them with a sweet reward and bumblebees can be trained to roll a ball into a goal, revealing unexpectedly complex learning abilities for an insect, researchers said Thursday. The findings in the U.S. journal Science offer the first evidence that bees can learn ...
Small drones coated with horsehair and a sticky gel could one day help pollinate crops and offset the costly loss of bee populations worldwide, researchers in Japan say. The miniature robots, described in the journal Chem, are a long way from being deployed in ...
A wing-deforming virus shortens the life span of wild honeybees already contending with a startlingly long list of existential threats, researchers said Wednesday. Spread by microscopic mites, the microbe disrupts bees’ foraging and curtails their lives, experiments confirmed for the first time. “Deformed wing ...
Scientists in Britain have managed to teach bumblebees to pull strings to get to food and then pass on what they have learned to others in their colony- showing a high level of intelligence despite their tiny brains. Researchers at Queen Mary University of ...
Minnesota’s governor on Friday ordered the broadest restrictions yet in a U.S. state on the use of agricultural pesticides that have been blamed for hurting bees, fueling concerns that farmers there will not be able to protect crops from insects. Gov. Mark Dayton issued ...
A widely used class of insecticides called neonicotinoids has contributed to the large-scale and long-term decline of wild bees, according to research unveiled Tuesday. A study covered 62 species from 1994 to 2011, examining the impact of exposure to the pesticide, which was used ...
The vast majority of telephone calls on household pests fielded by the Shibuya Ward Office’s Public Hygiene Division in 2014 were not about rats, cockroaches or spiders but they involved something with a little more sting in its tail — hornets, wasps and bees. ...
Akie Abe, wife of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, harvested honey on Monday for the first time from Japanese honeybees she keeps in the inner garden of the Prime Minister’s Official Residence in Tokyo. About 2 kg of honey was gathered from a beehive using ...
All of the impressive scientific and medical gains of modern civilization are in danger of being lost because of the effects of climate change and environmental degradation.
Mass deaths of honeybees are increasing in Japan, due apparently to pesticides used for killing stink bugs in rice paddies, according to a study by the agricultural ministry. The ministry found that many cases of large-scale honeybee deaths occurred when such pesticides were sprayed ...
Wild bees provide crop pollination services worth more than $3,250 per hectare per year, a study reported Tuesday. Their value to the food system is “in the billions, globally,” its authors wrote in the journal Nature Communications. Over three years, researchers followed the activities ...
Like nicotine for humans, certain pesticides seem to hold an addictive attraction for bees, which seek out tainted food even if it may be bad for them, research showed Wednesday. Not only did bees show no signs of avoiding neonicotinoid-laced food in lab tests, ...
