Decoding the meaning of their dance: Scientists spy on booty-shaking bees to help conservation
We have long known honeybees shake their behinds to communicate the location of high-value flower patches to one another, a form of signaling that scientists refer to as "waggle dances." A group of U.S. biologists have now decoded the meaning of over 1,500 of these ...
Climate change has contributed to a sharp drop in bumblebee populations across North America and Europe in recent decades, scientists said Friday. Compared to the period 1900-1974, bumblebee numbers across dozens of distinct species dropped, on average, 46 percent during the first 15 years of ...
Hive of activity: Tapping into the buzz of backyard beekeeping in Japan
The importance of bees to Japan's agricultural sector certainly isn't lost on domestic hobbyists.
It was a case of hold the honey, double the mustard in Times Square at lunchtime on Tuesday. Police shut part of 43rd Street near Seventh Avenue after a thick swarm of bees gathered atop a blue and yellow umbrella over a hotdog cart in ...
Researchers in Canada playing detective with the yellow-banded bumblebee's genome have found evidence that inbreeding and disease are the likely reasons for the decline of the species, York University associate professor Amro Zayed says. The team led by Zayed, Sheila Colla and biology researcher Clement ...
Trump administration lifts Obama-era GMO crop ban on U.S. wildlife refuges
The Trump administration has rescinded an Obama-era ban on the use of pesticides linked to declining bee populations and the cultivation of genetically modified crops in dozens of national wildlife refuges where farming is permitted. Environmentalists, who had sued to bring about the 2-year-old ban, ...
Bee research may redefine understanding of intelligence
The brain of a honeybee is tiny — the size of a pin head — and contains less than a million neurons, compared to the 85 billion in our own brains. Yet with that sliver of brain, bees can do some extraordinary things. They ...
Elderly wheelchair user dies after attack by swarm of hornets
An 87-year-old woman died in September after she was stung more than 150 times by a swarm of giant hornets in Ozu, Ehime Prefecture, as she traveled home from a nursing facility, the local fire service headquarters said Thursday. Neither a staff member from the ...
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 London ...
Minnesota sets broadest U.S. limits on chemicals blamed for bee declines
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 an ...
Taking the sting out of household infestations
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. Of ...
