To help draw bees’ attention, flowers that are pollinated by bees have typically evolved to send very strong colour signals.
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Bees need flowers to live, and we need bees to pollinate our crops. Understanding bee vision can help us better support our buzzy friends and the critical pollination services they provide.
Moving beyond pesticides to control the destructive Varroa mite that’s killing honeybees is appealing, but requires more research.
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Bee colonies are threatened by a mite. However, a different mite has been evaluated for its potential to address this threat.
All a-flutter.
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Evidence-based advice from experts on how to make your garden a friendly environment for pollinators.
Remotely monitoring honeybee hives can help track the health of the colony.
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Remote sensors allowed us to observe the in-hive activities of honeybees, which could be key to keeping bee colonies worldwide healthy.
Honey bees on a beekeeper’s hive.
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All too often the media buzz is centred around the managed honeybee, at the expense of other wild bee species.
Myrmecocystus honeypot ants, showing the repletes, their abdomens swollen to store honey, above ordinary workers.
Greg Hume via Wikimedia Commons
Honey might be synonymous with bees, but they’re not the only insects that come up with the goods.
Fake honey products have been found in Australia.
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Australia’s largest honey producer has been accused of selling fake honey. But what is fake honey – and why has it only been found now?
Beehive fences can help improve human-elephant coexistence.
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There is indeed merit to using beehives to keep elephants from eating and destroying crops.
A honey bee sniffs a cherry blossom.
AP Photo/Patrick Pleul
Pollination by commercially raised bees is important to a variety of crops but none more than California almonds. In turn, beekeepers depend on them.
How do you look to a bee? A face shown through a “bee eye” camera.
A. Dyer and S. Williams (RMIT)
Bees and wasps can recognise people’s faces – despite having less than one million brain cells, compared to 86,000 million brain cells that make up a human brain.
Australian plants leave a unique pollen signature in our honey.
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Australia’s distinctive native plants give our honey a distinctive stamp. Welcome to melissopalynology: the study of pollen.
A new study shows foraging for pollen and nectar causes stress in bees.
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The work honey bees do is critical for our ecosystems, but it comes at a high personal cost.
Bees live in complex environments, and make lots of decisions every day that are crucial for survival.
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The Romans may not have had a symbol for zero, but bees understand what it means beyond just the simple assumption “there’s nothing there”.
A bee visits an almond flower – an essential process for almond farmers.
Tiago J. G. Fernandez/Wikimedia Commons
Many fruits, nuts and other crops rely on bees to pollinate their flowers at just the right time of year. Many farmers rent bees to get the job done at pollination time.
Wild bumble bees provide natural pollination for blueberries in North America.
John Flannery
Honeybees receive a lot of attention, but the first North American bee to be listed as an endangered species is a wild bumble bee. Wild bees are vital pollinators, and some are declining rapidly.
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Meta-analysis studies have made it possible to sort through apparently contradictory research by looking at the bigger picture.
A honeybee (left), a scarab beetle (middle), and a fly (right) feeding on flowers of the white rock rose in a Mediterranean scrubland.
Aphrodite Kantsa.
Rather than trying to out-compete each other, flowers may work together to attract bees en masse. It’s the sort of approach that is effective in the world of advertising too.
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Honeybees are responsible for only a third of crop pollination in Britain.
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Hoverflies are helping spread disease among the already declining bee population.
Banning certain pesticides in Australia isn’t a panacea for bees.
REUTERS/Darren Staples
Australian bees have so far avoided the ‘colony collapse’ devastating hives around the world, but there’s growing pressure for a ban on certain insecticides blamed for bee deaths.