#Bees'Salt-Sensing Feet Explain Swimming pool Mystery The first-ever investigation of the honeybee ability to taste with their front feet may explain a persistent bee mystery:
Now scientists find that bees have taste receptors on their feet that are so sensitive to salt that they even dwarf the bees'capacity to taste sweets.
The solution to the bee pool mystery was just one of the researchers'findings. They also learned that bees don't sense bitter tastes with their feet.
The results are important for understanding the honeybee sensory system and potentially for figuring out how pesticides might harm these important pollinators and critical lab models for cognitive research.
Many scientists had investigated the bee's sense of sight and smell Giurfa said but one sense had been left out.
Practically nobody looked at the sense of taste in bees which is so important for them he told Live Science.
Over the course of two years Sanchez captured bees and stimulated their front feet with a variety of tasty (and not-so-tasty) solutions from sweet to bitter.
Like other insects bees don't confine their sense of taste to their mouths. They also taste using their antennae and the surfaces of their feet.
Sanchez measured the bees'reactions by observing whether or not they stuck out their tongues a tasty substance elicits a protrusion of the proboscis
Salt-seeking bees Unsurprisingly given bees'need for nectar the insects'feet are incredibly sensitive to sugar.
The bees need salt for their own metabolic processes and to carry back to their hives to help larvae develop Giurfa said.
Thus homeowners'trendy saltwater pools attract bees like flies to honey. Finally the study researchers found that bees don't seem to sense bitterness.
They don't retract their tongues in response to the taste nor do their cells show an electrical reaction to bitter substances Giurfa said.
because bees are such an important species to the understanding of the neural basis of memory and learning.
But the research may also benefit the bees themselves. Bee colonies worldwide are experiencing die offs a mysterious phenomenon called colony collapse disorder.
Pesticides and other environmental contaminants are suspects and researchers have turned their attention to how pesticides might affect the honeybee navigation system memory and brain function.
He and his colleagues would like to experiment with exposing bee feet to miniscule amounts of pesticide to see how the cells respond.
With respect to pollinators such as bees it was up to 50%more. However the magnitude of the effect varies between different types of organism and between fields growing different crops.
and found the bees were capable of staying afloat at remarkably inhospitable elevations. The team traveled to a mountain range in western China and collected six male bumblebees of the species Bombus impetuosus at about 10660 feet (3250 meters.
Gallery of Colorful Insect Wings The researchers placed the bees in clear sealed boxes and experimentally adjusted the oxygen levels
All of the bees were capable of flying in conditions equivalent to 13000 feet (4000 m) and some even made it past 30000 feet (9000 m) the height of the peak of Mount everest the team reported Tuesday (Feb 4) in the journal Biology Letters.
and lower oxygen concentrations of high elevations hypothesizing that the bees would either need to beat their wings faster
The researchers found that instead of beating their wings faster the bees increased the angle at
whether bees living at lower base elevations are also capable of flying at simulated high elevations
#Bee Fossils Provide Rare Glimpse into Ice age Environment A new analysis of rare leafcutter-bee fossils excavated from the Rancho La Brea Tar pits in Southern California has provided valuable insight
In the new study researchers used high-resolution micro-computed tomography (CT) scanners to analyze two fossils of leafcutter-bee nests excavated from the pits.
and the physical features of the bee pupae (stage of development where the bee transforms into an adult from a larva within the leafy nests
and cross-referencing their data with environmental niche models that predict the geographic distribution of species the scientists determined their Ice age specimens belonged to Megachile gentilis a bee species that still exists today.
Leafcutter bees Unlike honeybees and other colony-dwelling bees leafcutter bees are solitary. To reproduce females build small cylindrical nest cells made of carefully chosen leaves and sometimes flower petals.
The bees build these multilayered nest cells in secure locations near the ground such as under the bark of dead trees in stems
and only later after the two cells were separated accidentally did people suspect they might be bees.
When Holden first came across the fossils in NHM she immediately thought they were leafcutter bees
and one female She decided to try to identify the bees'species. I had read some of the big literature that said leafcutter bees aren't really identifiable by their nest cells Holden said.
'Holden paired up with leafcutter-bee expert Terry Griswold an entomologist with the U s. Department of agriculture to try to pinpoint characteristics that distinguish between the nest cells of different leafcutter bee species. Piecing the evidence together The researchers
and examined micro-CT scans of the bee nest cells and discovered there are some differences in the way different leafcutter bees make their cells.
Usually the oblong leaves that form the side walls of the cell are bent into a cup at the bottom
This finding narrowed down the possible bee species. The size of the cells and their vegetative components such as the lack of flower petals and the type of leaves included further constrained the species list.
and ensure the bees didn't belong to the next-best-candidate species M. onobrychidis the team turned to environmental niche models.
The bees didn't simply fall into a tar pit; they were placed into the ground purposefully. The researchers believe the mother bee planted her babies near an asphalt pipe
and the pupae became embalmed in an asphalt-rich matrix when oil soaked into the sediment around the pipe.
and her team concluded that the leafcutter bees lived in a low-elevation moist environment during the Late Pleistocene.
In February the Fresno Bee newspaper reported that planned water releases for the restoration have been put on hold until at least 2015.
Bees African elephants belt out distinct alarm calls to specify which kind of threat is approaching in the wild be it humans or bees a new study shows.
but these threats include people who poach the animals for their ivory and swarms of angry bees
A powerful swarm of bees could even kill a thin-skinned calf. Researchers had discovered already that elephants produce a rumble like a gravelly baritone growl in response to the threat of bees.
What's more elephants will flee when they hear a recording of this rumble even
when there's no sign of bees around according to that 2010 study in PLOS ONE. Elephant Images:
and the sounds of angry bees triggered uneasy and vigilant behavior in the elephants; the animals started sniffing they lifted their heads up
but only in response to the noises of angry bees likely to knock any insects away from their face.
There were slight differences in the formant frequencies of the rumbles in response to bees and the rumbles associated with humans the researchers said.
Studying the Bugs in Bees This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.
They made the journey in a minivan with a pet cat and 100000 bees. That was probably the most heroic event in our beekeeping saga to date says evolutionary biologist Nancy Moran a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies symbiosis particularly among multicellular hosts and microbes.
We didn't want to be without bees upon arrival in Texas and it wasn't a good time of year to start new colonies.
The bees chauffeured by graduate student Waldan Kwong and postdoctoral fellow Gordon bennett traveledin boxes nailed shut with duct tape over the cracks between the boxes
Bees are less excitable when it's cooler. At night they waited to park the minivan until after dark
and then opened the windows so the bees didn't overheat in the closed space.
It seemed unlikely that anyone would try to steal something from a van full of bees.
The bees arrived in Austin with no problems and now live on top of a building on campus where their main forage might be drops of soda on discarded cans around campus says Moran who for many years studied the maternally transmitted symbionts of aphids
and other sap-feeding insects but has expanded in recent years to bees. Symbionts are organisms that coexist
Understanding the gut microbes in bees Today the broad aim of her research is to understand the diversity
Interactions within the bee colonies are the basis for transfer of the symbionts to newly emerged adult bees.
Bees of course are critically important ecologically and economically particularly in agriculture where honeybees pollinate an estimated $15 billion worth of agricultural products in the United states including more than 130 fruits according to the U s. Department of agriculture.
In recent years however there has been increasing concern over rampant bee colony losses dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder and the overall health of bees in general.
and function in the bee gut microbial community system some bumblebees are becoming rare and have shrunken ranges.
or could microbiota be preserved in a way that helps bees thrive? A big part of the problem with bee health is undoubtedly the decreasing availability of diverse floral resources
and possibly nesting sites in the case of bumblebees she adds. But exposure to toxins and to diseases also play a part based on numerous studies.
So we hope that we find something useful for bees. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding her work with $2006416 over five years awarded in 2010.
but the genes were largely absent in bees from countries where such antibiotic use is banned.
In the bee system even though transmission is mostly within colonies the symbionts are much more likely to undergo horizontal transmission she says meaning transmission among members of the same species that are not parent and child.
Now we are finding that strains of the bee gut microbiota show a large set of`accessory'genes and functions.
and that different bee species and different colonies within a species seem to have different strains of symbionts.
and Gilliamella but one bumble bee species seemed to sometimes miss being inoculated she says. The'right'symbionts are simply absent from some individuals.
And we can start to understand how the normal microbiota interacts with disease agents that infect bees.
The temperament of bees When it's time to start new colonies Moran's lab orders bees from different places around the country
but favors northern California bees because of their very sweet personalities meaning they stay calm when the hive is opened
Feisty bees are touchy and prone to attack when someone just gets close to the hive.
We had some Texas bees but they were a bit feisty perhaps they did not like being plopped down in New england before she moved to Austin.
Lab technician Kim Hammond cares for the bees and has developed into a master beekeeper Moran says.
She keeps the bee colonies very healthy and we sometimes cannot detect pathogens that are generally common.
In some of our experiments we want to infect bees with pathogens to see if the microbiota protects against pathogens.
New to bee research and wanting to learn the basics of beekeeping Moran actually kept several colonies in her own yard for several years.
Of course we wear bee suits. In the lab we mostly work with young worker bees which do not sting much plus we have contained them.
and Bees Get Depressed (New world Library 2013). This Op-Ed is adapted from one that appeared in Bekoff's column Animal Emotions in Psychology Today.
As part of a current CSIRO project we are fitting tiny micro-sensors to 5000 bees in Tasmania as part of a world-first research program to monitor their movements and their environment.
It's true that bees collect pollen from plants Costa said and honey has pollens in it from the local area.
The pollen in bee honey comes from flowers and is very heavy and falls to the ground.
The newly constructed bee hotel at the University of New hampshire's Woodman Farm isn't much to look at with its cinder block floors
The bee hotel is at the center of the first-ever comprehensive study of New england's bee population.
The study led by researchers at the University of New hampshire's New hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station (NHAES) aims to assess the condition of the region's estimated 250 species of bees.
Gallery of the Cutest Bugs The study will establish the first complete diversity assessment of native bees in the region
The study called Sustainable Solutions to Problems Affecting Bee Health was launched to coincide with National Pollinator Week (June 16-22) an annual event sanctioned by the U s. Secretary of agriculture that highlights the urgent issue
and habitat preferences will be fundamental to future studies to ameliorate declining bee populations and to target species at risk Rehan said.
In addition to helping protect native bees in New england Rehan said the project is designed to raise awareness about how humans are affecting pollinator populations in the region as well as across other areas of the country.
Bees which play a critical role in the health of food crops and natural ecosystems have experienced rapid declines in population and diversity over the past several years research from NHAES shows.
Loss of habitat and agricultural environments as well as the widespread use of pesticides and chemicals in farming are believed to be contributing to the current bee crisis throughout the United states. The value of pollination to agriculture is estimated at more than $200 billion each year worldwide
said Rehan who oversees the University of New hampshire's Bee Lab. This makes the university's research into the subject even more pressing
and has led to the launch of a longer-term project to monitor the biodiversity of bees in New hampshire.
The bee hotel at Woodman Farm represents one part of this project with other monitoring sites at NHAES facilities also contributing much-needed data.
and changes in bee communities. The researchers plan to use genomic screening on the winged guests of the bee hotel to identify which species suffer low genetic variability.
This trait the researchers explained may indicate certain genetic issues that can lead to the decline
or even extinction of a species. John Wraith NHAES director and dean of the College of Life sciences and Agriculture expressed enthusiasm for the bee hotel project and its related studies noting the impact that pollinators
and hopes that continued research and education can help reverse the trend in declining bee populations in New england and other regions.
and policymakers about native bees and habitat preferences we can encourage the regional and national authorities to create
and maintain native bee habitats Rehan said. Bee boxes wildflowers and unmowed pastures are but a few ways to improve healthy pollinator communities.
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#Farmers Get $3 Million in Bee Lunch Money There's no such thing as a free lunch
unless you're a bee. A new Department of agriculture initiative offers up to $3 million to improve the food supply for honeybees.
Of course the bees really do earn their keep. Commercial honeybees alone pollinate some $15 billion of produce each year according to the Associated press a number that doesn't include the economic impact of native bees that also pollinate crops.
But both native bees and imported honeybees are struggling in the face of colony collapse disorder a mysterious ailment that kills off whole hives.
Colony collapse may result in part from a plant virus that has started infecting bees scientists believe.
Other deadly viruses and possibly chemical contaminates play a roll as well. To stave the losses the USDA program will pay farmers
and other plants that bees love the AP reports. Livestock can also use these pastures to graze.
Feeding bees may help them stave off illness the agency hopes particularly in an agricultural landscape dominated by corn soybean and cotton not the insects'preferred plants.
000 Killer bees A municipal worker who got stung by an estimated 1000 bees while mowing a park lawn on Thursday (July 24) was in stable condition.
To be lethal the bees would likely have had to sting the man several hundred more times experts say.
In addition the victim seems not to have been allergic to the bees. The bees also stung two other workers who tried to help the man according to Wichita Falls'News Channel 6.)Not-so-killer bees Africanized honeybees
or killer bees have been in the United states since about 1990 according to May Berenbaum head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois. But despite their dramatic nickname these insects aren't that deadly.
Nature's 10 Biggest Pests An estimated 40 people in the United states die every year from stings by hymenoptera species. That group of insects includes some 150000 species of bees
Furthermore it's difficult to pin the blame on a particular species of bee in instances of injuries
These include the general health of the victims and their weight and sensitivity to bee venom.
Furthermore people who are allergic to bee stings can experience a severe physiological reaction after just one sting Berenbaum said. 8 Strange Signs You're Having an Allergic reaction Called anaphylactic shock this severe allergic reaction can prove lethal for some people attacked by bees.
and while she said that everyone is likely to experience some kind of allergic reaction to bee venom only some individuals experience anaphylactic shock.
Allergic to bees or not anyone who encounters a swarm of these defensive insects should run away she said.
As she explained the bees will just be waiting for you when you come up for a breath of air.
#As Plant virus Jumps to Bees, Does it Cause Colony Collapse? Jeff Nesbit was the director of public affairs for two prominent federal science agencies.
Researchers have studied bee colonies for years in an effort to discover the root causes for the collapse of millions of bee colonies an ongoing problem with significant downstream ripple effects for large-scale agriculture and food production efforts.
It is now common and routine for researchers to screen bees in colonies for rare viruses.
the scientists found a viral pathogen that typically infects plants spreading inside the bees. The detection of this virus (the Tobacco Ringspot Virus or TRSV) could help explain the decline of honeybees
whether this plant-infecting virus could also cause systemic infection in the bees said Yan Ping Chen a study author who works at ARS.
Besides TRSV researchers have linked Israel Acute Paralysis Virus Acute Bee Paralysis Virus Chronic Paralysis Virus Kashmir Bee Virus Deformed Wing Bee Virus
Last summer for instance researchers from the University of Maryland and the USDA collected pollen from seven major types of crops along the East Coast where CCD has been especially destructive where bees had been in serious decline and fed
them to healthy bees. The pollen fed to the healthy bees contained an average of nine different types of pesticides and fungicides.
The researchers discovered that the healthy bees that ate the fungicides which are supposedly harmless to bees were actually three times more likely to become infected with a parasite that's known to cause CCD.
What the study indicated is that there may not be a single cause of CCD it could be a complex web of many chemicals that involves different types and classes of pesticides and fungicides.
In the new mbio study researchers explained that about 5 percent of known plant viruses like TRSV are transmitted by pollen
More insidiously as far as bees are concerned is the way in which these error-filled virus copies become a sort of cloud of genetically-related variants that seemingly work in concert to determine the pathology of their hosts.
when it jumps from plants to bees. Viruses such as TRSV once they jump species are a likely source of emerging
The increasing prevalence of TRSV in conjunction with other bee viruses is associated with a gradual decline of host populations
This Op-Ed was adapted from Another Answer to Why the Bees Are Dying which first appeared in Nesbit's column At the Edge in U s. News & World Report.
says James Strange, an entomologist at the USDA-ARS Bee Biology and Systematics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, a conference organizer.
and nurseries to monitor these islands of bee biodiversity, she adds. Scientists at the conference also identified a need for basic research into bumblebee genetic diversity.
Tired bees make poor dancers: Nature Newswe all struggle to communicate after a sleepless night,
Sleep-deprived bees are less proficient than their well-rested hive mates at indicating the location of a food source to other members of the colony by waggle dancing the figure-of-eight dance used to communicate the quality
says that sleep deprivation could conceivably affect bees when hives are invaded by predators or parasites,
Bees bustle around, frequently bumping into each other, he says. It's also possible that sleep deprivation could exacerbate colony collapse disorder,
referring to recent alarming declines in bee populations worldwide, although this hasn't been tested. Klein and his colleagues devised a method to keep some bees within a colony awake without disturbing the rest of the hive.
They attached magnetic steel discs to 25 bees that had been trained to visit a feeder of sucrose solution located 1 kilometre away from the hive.
Another 25 trained bees were tagged with nonmagnetic copper discs. During the night, while the bees were asleep,
a bank of magnets mounted on a rail, called the'insominator'by the researchers, was passed back and forth along one wall of the hive for 12 hours,
jostling the steel-tagged bees and preventing them from dropping off. The researchers then observed the behaviour of the sleep-deprived bees
and their well-rested copper-tagged hive mates for 48 hours, watching a total of 545 waggle dances.
The team found that steel-tagged bees were less able than those with copper tags to indicate the direction from the hive to the feeder (see videos of waggle dances performed by non-sleep deprived
and sleep-deprived bees. The correct dance angle is superimposed over the dancer in each case.
However, their ability to communicate the distance to the feeder was affected not significantly. Signalling the direction information may be cognitively
However, Randolf Menzel, a neurobiologist at the Free University of Berlin who also studies bees,
says that the directional sense of bees is known to be partly magnetic. Changing the magnetic field may disturb their magnetic orientation,
We tested for that by comparing the dances between the magnetic steel-tagged bees and the copper-tagged bees on days when the bees had not been sleep-deprived,
he says. Currently a member of the BEEGROUP at the University of W Â rzburg in Germany, Klein says that he would like to investigate
whether the bees following the compromised waggle dances can find their way to the feeder.
Geneticists bid to build a better bee: Nature Newsfor Scott Cornman, the honeybee genome is prized a resource,
Cornman, a geneticist for the Bee Research Laboratory of the US Department of agriculture (USDA) in Beltsville, Maryland, is trying to characterize the various pathogens that plague the honeybee (Apis mellifera), arguably the world's most important insect.
His strategy is to subtract the honeybee genome from every other stray bit of genetic residue he can find in bee colonies, healthy and diseased.
The remaining genetic material gives a complex metagenomic portrait of other organisms that inhabit the bee's world
alone or in combination, might push a bee colony into precipitous decline. Right now we're in the discovery phase,
or so researchers in attendance last week at the Honey Bee Genomics & Biology meeting, held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New york. It was dedicated the first conference on the topic
honey  bee colonies across much of the Northern hemisphere began to show alarming declines. A syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) has been causing the insects to die off in large numbers,
and a greater prevalence of several viruses, two of which had not been detected in bees before. Yet despite having a multitude of enemies
many bees are holding their own, says research entomologist Jay Evans of the USDA's bee laboratory.
The question is not why are bees getting sick, but how are they surviving against this onslaught of parasites,
he says. The genome offers a window into the bees'immune pathways, Evans adds. The goal is to identify the genes that are crucial in helping bees thwart attack,
and, ultimately, to strengthen these defences. You can breed for these traits, but with genetic markers you could do it faster,
he says. In cases in which nature cannot do the job some researchers are now exploring more direct ways of boosting bees'resilience.
In some insects, double stranded-rna RNA, a hallmark of viral infection, can provoke a specific antiviral immune response.
Flenniken adds that knowing more about the bee's immune responses might help researchers to find ways of priming the system
and help bees to cope with their foes at the genomic level. Such a prospect may be a long way off,
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