How do we know that bees were around when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth? The main evidence comes from fossils – the mineralized remains of long-dead organisms.
Tiny fairy wasps are so small they can lay their eggs inside other insects eggs, but they punch above their weight when it comes to keeping pests down.
‘Larry, I have to confess. I’m not a wasp. I’m an orchid.’
Alyssa Weinstein
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.
Scientists in Japan have discovered a new species of wasp that induces a zombie-like state in spiders in order to manipulate them into protecting the wasp’s own offspring.
This spider doesn’t know it yet, but he’s about to build a new home for that wasp larva on his back.
Keizo Takasuka
“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is a common refrain. But usually it is not followed by the words “because your neighbours may kill you”. However, this is precisely the scenario faced by some female…
The bobtail squid and bioluminscent bacteria are just one of hundreds of examples of mutualism.
Klaus Stiefel/Flickr
Reproduction for a female fig wasp can be a nightmarish process. When she is ready to lay her eggs, she leaves the fig in which she was born and became pregnant and searches for another. After she finds…
A queen bee tended by her workers … but take away her pheromones and they start to act strangely.
Flickr/KrisFricke
Much like people, insect colonies like to know if her majesty is at home. In the ants, bees, wasps and termites (the “big four” of the social insect world), the queen has long been suspected of using special…
Recently a newspaper asked its readers to propose species that were, ecologically speaking, “useless”, such that their loss would not have any great knock-on effect on other species or biological cycles…
This is just asking for trouble.
Wikimedia Commons
Few of us consider that having sex could result in a violent, instantaneous death. But in nature, where sex and violence are often two sides of the same coin, many animals are routinely subjected to such…