As invasive species transform the world, frontline agencies take solace that species needing unique partners can’t invade alone. A new study on figs shows they may find new partners to invade anyway.
Worker bees with capped brood (brown), open brood (white larva), all sorts of coloured pollen and shiny fresh nectar.
Cooper Schouten
A single colony of bees can have 60,000 bees in it. Together, they can visit up to 50 million flowers each day to collect pollen and nectar. They're not called 'busy bees' for nothing!
A swarm of giant Asian honey bees.
Rickythai/Shutterstock
Fruit ripening is all about plants getting animals to eat the seeds that are inside their fruits. This helps the plants get their seeds to somewhere new where they can grow into a new plant.
To help draw bees’ attention, flowers that are pollinated by bees have typically evolved to send very strong colour signals.
Shutterstock
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.
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.
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.
The well-being of pollinators like bees have a direct impact on our lives.
Vida van der Walt
Pollination in South Africa's ecosystems is extremely complex. However new advances such as pollen metabarcoding help us understand interactions between pollinators and pollen.
Bees have been living with the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder for a decade.
Simon Klein
It's a decade since US beekeepers first noticed that their bees were mysteriously dying. Now we know much more about Colony Collapse Disorder, raising hopes that we can turn bees' fortunes around.