Posts tagged bees
Isabella Rossellini’s charming educational video about bees.
This fantastic short film by Isabella Rossellini for Burt’s Bees explains how bees mate, spread pollen, and communicate (“we wag our ass and we talk to one another”).
Bat, Bee, Frog Deaths May Be Linked
In recent years, diseases have ravaged through bat, honeybee and amphibian populations, and now animal experts suspect that shared factors may link the deaths, which are putting many species at risk for extinction.
Promiscuous Queens Make Healthy Hives
A reputation for chastity may have worked for Elizabeth I of England, but queen bees who start their reign with a royal orgy end up with healthier hives.
When queens mate with multiple males their hives end up with greater genetic diversity and more robust communities of symbiotic bacteria living in the bee’s guts. Heather Mattila, an ecologist at Wellesley College, found significantly more gut bacteria in bees from hives where the queens partnered with multiple males than in more sexually deprived hives.
Bees Protect Kenyan Crops From Elephants
Beehive fences are useful barriers in Kenya — keeping elephants out and providing a sweet source of income.
Biologist Lucy King put elephants’ fear of bees to use guarding farmers’ crops in Kenya. Not only do the bees protect the fields, their honey provides a secondary income for the farmers.
Everyone seems to win here.
Tim Wall on Kenya’s innovative new bee hive program.
New York City Buzzing With New Bee Species
The American Museum of Natural History has announced the discovery of eleven new species of bees, including four from New York City and its suburbs.
The bees, described in the journal Zootaxa, include small-to-medium-sized sweat bees, so named because of their attraction to the salt in human sweat. A team of scientists identified the bees with the help of the vast digital and physical bee collections at the AMNH.
