Longstanding analyses based on the fossil record holds ants and wasps in a clade known as Vespoidea with bees as a sister group.
The team reassess the relationships between the subfamilies of bees wasps and ants and suggest that wasps are part of a separate clade from ants
and bees though further genome sequences and comparative data will help to resolve this controversy The dataset offers a first chance to analyse subfamily relationships across large numbers of genes
'This finding would have important general implications for our understanding of eusociality as it would suggest that bees
and that bees are lost wasps that predacious behaviours.''Their work suggests that novel genes play a much more important role in social behaviour than we previously thought.
On their side bees acquire a positive charge as they fly through the air. No spark is produced as a charged bee approaches a charged flower
but a small electric force builds up that can potentially convey information. By placing electrodes in the stems of petunias the researchers showed that
when a bee lands the flower's potential changes and remains so for several minutes.
which flowers tell bees another bee has recently been visiting? To their surprise the researchers discovered that bumblebees can detect
when bees were given a learning test they were faster at learning the difference between two colours
How then do bees detect electric fields? This is not yet known although the researchers speculate that hairy bumblebees bristle up under the electrostatic force just like one's hair in front of an old television screen.
The last thing a flower wants is to attract a bee and then fail to provide nectar:
a lesson in honest advertising since bees are good learners and would soon lose interest in such an unrewarding flower.
The co-evolution between flowers and bees has a long and beneficial history so perhaps it's not entirely surprising that we are still discovering today how remarkably sophisticated their communication is.
--whereas the communicative waggles of bees or the short audible messages of primates are more like the lexical layer.
Bees communicate visually using precise waggles to indicate sources of foods to their peers; other primates can make a range of sounds comprising warnings about predators and other messages.
We can communicate essential information like bees or primates--but like birds we also have a melodic capacity
If this is right then human language has a precursor in nature in evolution that we can actually test today he says adding that bees birds
#Bees attracted to contrasting colors when looking for nectarflower colors that contrast with their background are more important to foraging bees than patterns of colored veins on pale flowers according to new research by Heather Whitney from the University of Cambridge in the UK and her colleagues.
Their observation of how patterns of pigmentation on flower petals influence bumblebees'behavior suggests that color veins give clues to the location of the nectar.
however that bees have an innate preference for striped flowers. The work is published online in Springer's journal Naturwissenschaften--The Science of Nature.
Bees can identify and are attracted sometimes to patterned flowers over plain flowers. These patterns can increase the speed with
which bees locate the nectar reward in a flower. Venation patterns--or lines of color on flower petals--are common in Antirrhinum flowers commonly known as snapdragons.
They exposed bees who had seen not flowers before to veined ivory and red types of snapdragon flowers.
They observed whether bees could distinguish between ivory and veined flowers and which type of flower they preferred
From the bees'perspective red flowers reflected little light while red veins on ivory flowers slightly changed the color of the flower.
Bees successfully discriminated between ivory and veined flowers but showed no preference for one or the other.
But it appears that the color contrast of a flower with its background has a greater influence on bee preference.
which is a group with similar characteristics to that of bees and wasps but with a different taxonomic order.
Lead author Colleen Bee an assistant professor of marketing at Oregon State university said the Olympics are a good example of an event where fans often cheer for little-known athletes competing in little-watched sports.
or against someone Bee said. The stories matter here. It magnifies the experience of watching the game
In the study Bee had participants watch speed skating competitions. She confirmed that none of the participants were familiar with the athletes before watching the event.
or feel like they aren't good people Bee said. Yet because they are exciting to watch
when the outcome is not desirable due to the entertaining and exciting nature of suspense Bee said pointing to her last study which found that winning
Bee is an expert on sports marketing particularly in the areas of sports and emotions and gender/consumer responses.
#Two new studies show why biodiversity is important for pollination services in California almondagricultural demand for pollination is growing more quickly than the supply of honey bees the dominant species managed for crop pollination.
Biological sciences shows that the pollination effectiveness of honey bees in California almond orchards was greater in the presence of other bees.
Almond is a crop highly dependent on honey bee pollination and is a $3 billion industry in California.
The study by researchers in Germany at Leuphana University of LÃ neburg and California at UC Berkeley and Davis found that where other species of bees were present honey bee behaviour changed
and their pollination effectiveness was greater than in orchards where other bees were absent. Furthermore orchards with wild bees had a greater proportion fruit set.
These findings show that wild pollinators not only contribute directly to almond pollination but also indirectly through increasing the pollination service provided by the honey bees.
A second study in the same system published in Global Change Biology found two other mechanisms by which pollinator diversity improved pollination service to almond.
Firstly they found that honey bees preferred to visit flowers in the top parts of the almond trees.
Where wild pollinators were present they often visited the lower parts of the trees filling the gap in pollination service left by the honey bees.
Secondly in high winds orchards with only honey bees present had almost no pollination service as the honey bees were not flying.
In orchards with a diversity of pollinators pollination service was buffered to an extent by the wild bees.
During high winds the wild bees were observed still visiting almond flowers. Wild pollinators can therefore help sustain pollination service under extreme weather conditions when the service by honey bees declines.
This is particularly important in almond as it flowers early in the year when the weather conditions can be unfavourable for bee flight.
The findings presented in the two articles highlight different ways biodiversity is important for pollination service.
because the bees readily live alongside humans in towns and villages--according to research from the University of East Anglia.
and the flowering plants visited by the bees at a large number of sites across southern Norfolk including both urban and rural sites over a three month period.
#Flying doctor bees to prevent cherry diseaseuniversity of Adelaide researchers are introducing a method to use bees to deliver disease control to cherry blossom preventing brown rot in cherries.
and bee researcher Dr Katja Hogendoorn postdoctoral research associate with the University's School of Agriculture Food and Wine.
Instead of spraying fungicide we're using bees to deliver a biological control agent right to the flowers where it is needed.
The bees pick up the spores between their body hairs and bring them to the flowers.
Dr Hogendoorn says the use of bees has many environmental and economic benefits compared to spraying fungicide.
The bees deliver control on target every day she says. There is no spray drift or run off into the environment less use of heavy equipment water labour and fuel.
Dr Hogendoorn says adoption of the technique will have the additional benefit of building up the honey bee industry
which is causing great damage and cost to bee and horticultural industries around the world.
Camilla Moonen and her team focus on natural pollinators like the wild bee. In experiments they are investigating
and crop-pollinating bees. The researchers have developed an extraordinarily detailed data set to show human impacts on phylogenetic diversity a measure of the evolutionary history embodied in wildlife--in this case birds.
#Bacteria from bees possible alternative to antibioticsraw honey has been used against infections for millennia before honey--as we now know it--was manufactured
Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have identified a unique group of 13 lactic acid bacteria found in fresh honey from the honey stomach of bees.
It seems to have worked well for millions of years of protecting bees'health and honey against other harmful microorganisms.
One third of our food is dependent on the pollination of fruits nuts and vegetables by bees and other insects.
In contrast to other domestic species management of honeybees seems to have increased levels of genetic variation by mixing bees from different parts of the world.
Another unexpected result was that honeybees seem to be derived from an ancient lineage of cavity-nesting bees that arrived from Asia around 300000 years ago and rapidly spread across Europe and Africa.
#Of bees, mites, and viruses: Virus infections after arrival of new parasitic mite in New zealand honeybee colonieshoneybee colonies are dying at alarming rates worldwide.
but the exact cause--and how bees can be saved--remains unclear. An article published on August 21st in PLOS Pathogens examines the viral landscape in honeybee colonies in New zealand after the recent arrival of the parasitic Varroa destructor mite.
Varroa is thought to be one of the main stressors that reduce bee fitness. As they feed on the blood of pupae
and adult bees the mites can transmit several honeybee viruses with high efficiency. Uncontrolled Varroa infestation can thereby cause an accelerating virus epidemic and so kill a bee colony within two to three years.
Interested in the complex interplay between bees mites and viruses Fanny Mondet from the University of Otago Dunedin New zealand and INRA Avignon France and colleagues took advantage of a unique situation in New zealand:
The country was invaded only recently by Varroa which was detected first on the North Island in 2001 and still had an active infestation expansion front traveling southward into Varroa-free areas of the country
The researchers'aim was to monitor the first stages of the Varroa infestation and its consequences for bees and bee viruses.
and is thought to be a direct cause of Varroa-induced colony collapse was seen almost never in New zealand bee colonies before the arrival of Varroa or ahead of the expansion zone after 2001.
Another highly virulent Varroa-transmitted virus Kashmir Bee Virus (KBV) also showed a close association with Varroa.
or collapse of the bee colonies infested by Varroa. For example KBV could play a key role in the dramatic honeybee colony weakening observed during the first years of Varroa infestation.
Future work they state will focus on the mechanisms that form the evolutionary basis for the bee-Varroa-virus interaction.
You can think of this like a swarm of bees: While the swarm in general moves the bees themselves are going in all different directions.
Because of this motion within the disk the stars are considered to be well mixed--like a tossed salad.
and 1/3 of all agricultural food production directly depends on bee pollination. As a result there has been a flurry of research on honeybee parasitic mite infestations viral diseases and the direct and indirect impacts of pesticides.
even a few nanograms of active ingredient disturbed the sense of taste olfactory learning and motor activity of the bees.
A key characteristic of colony collapse disorder is the incapacity of the honey bees to return to their hives
which could result in declining bee populations. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.
#Angry bees: Insect aggression boosted by altering brain metabolismscientists report they can crank up insect aggression simply by interfering with a basic metabolic pathway in the insect brain.
Their study of fruit flies and honey bees shows a direct causal link between brain metabolism (how the brain generates the energy it needs to function) and aggression.
When he and his colleagues looked at brain gene activity in honey bees after they had faced down an intruder the team found that some metabolic genes were suppressed.
In the new study postdoctoral researcher Clare Rittschof used drugs to suppress key steps in oxidative phosphorylation in the bee brains.
She saw that aggression increased in the drugged bees in a dose-responsive manner Robinson said.
But the drugs had no effect on chronically stressed bees--they were not able to increase their aggression in response to an intruder.
Because fruit flies and honey bees are separated by 300 million years of evolution this is a very robust and well-conserved mechanism he said.
Video of honey bees responding to an intruder: https://www. youtube. com/watch? v=niz3uiwz36qstory Source:
#Bees able to spot which flowers offer best rewards before landingbumblebees are able to connect differences in pollen quality with floral features like petal colour and so land only on the flowers that offer the best rewards according to a new
Unlike nectar bees do not ingest pollen whilst foraging on flowers and so until now it has been unclear
which may allow bees to quickly learn which flowers provide the most nutritious pollen rewards for rearing their young.
There is still very little known about how bees decide which flowers to visit for pollen collection.
which bees have experienced previously to be the best ones. Dr Elizabeth Nicholls a former Phd student at The University of Exeter and now a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sussex said:
Bees need to be able to select flowers providing the most nutritious food for rearing their young.
and what bees learn when collecting nectar from flowers but since bees don't eat pollen
when foraging we were interested to see whether they could still learn which flowers to visit
The experiments involved manipulating the quality of pollen offered to the bees by diluting the samples.
if they could differentiate quality before landing by only letting the bees smell and see the pollen rather than probing it;
and presenting the bees with four different coloured discs containing stronger and less diluted pollen to record preferences and change of preferences over time.
How honey bees stay coolhoney bees especially the young are highly sensitive to temperature and to protect developing bees adults work together to maintain temperatures within a narrow range.
Recently published research led by Philip T. Starks a biologist at Tufts University's School of arts and Sciences is the first to show that worker bees dissipate excess heat within a hive in process similar to how humans
This discovery also supports the theoretical construct of the bee hive as a superorganism--an entity in
Young bees develop within wax cells. For healthy development the youngsters must be maintained between 32 degrees Celsius or 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit and 35 degrees Celsius or 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
or 122 degrees Fahrenheitprevious research has shown that workers bees among other duties control the thermostat essential to the hive's survival.
But until the Tufts study scientists did not know how the bees got rid of the heat after they had absorbed it.
Each colony numbered 1000 to 2500 adult bees. An eighth hive empty of bees was used as a control.
Using a theater light the researchers raised the internal temperature of all eight hives for 15 minutes.
After 15 minutes a time brief enough to prevent serious harm to the bees the theater light was turned off.
Since the control hive did not have bees the differences in temperature were caused likely by worker behavior Starks says.
The thermal images clearly showed that the bees had moved physically the absorbed heat in their bodies to previously cooler areas of the hive.
#Radio frequency ID tags on honey bees reveal hive dynamicsscientists attached radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to hundreds of individual honey bees
Some foraging bees are much busier than others; and if those busy bees disappear others will take their place.
Tagging the bees revealed that about 20 percent of the foraging bees in a hive brought home more than half of the nectar
We found that some bees are working very very hard--as we would have expected said University of Illinois Institute for Genomic Biology director Gene E. Robinson who led the research.
But then we found some other bees that were not working as hard as the others. Citizen scientist Paul Tenczar developed the technique for attaching RFID tags to bees and tracking their flight activity with monitors.
He and Neuroscience Program graduate student Claudia Lutz measured the foraging activities of bees in several locations including some in hives in a controlled foraging environment.
Vikyath Rao a graduate student in the laboratory of U. of I. physics professor Nigel Goldenfeld analyzed the data using a computer model Rao and Goldenfeld developed.
Removal of the elite bees was associated with an almost fivefold increase in activity level in previously low-activity foragers the researchers wrote.
It is still possible that there truly are elite bees that have some differential abilities to work harder than others
Or it could be that all bees are capable of working at this level and there's some kind of colony-level regulation that has some of them working really really hard making many trips
Our observation is that the colony bounces back to a situation where some bees are very active
Do all bees have that capability? We still don't know. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
#Scientists track gene activity when honey bees do and dont eat honey: Significant differences depending on dietmany beekeepers feed their honey bees sucrose
or high-fructose corn syrup when times are lean inside the hive. This practice has come under scrutiny
however in response to colony collapse disorder the massive--and as yet not fully explained--annual die off of honey bees in the U s. and Europe.
Some suspect that inadequate nutrition plays a role in honey bee declines. In a new study described in Scientific Reports researchers took a broad look at changes in gene activity in response to diet in the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera)
and found significant differences occur depending on what the bees eat. The researchers looked specifically at an energy storage tissue in bees called the fat body
which functions like the liver and fat tissues in humans and other vertebrates. We figured that the fat body might be a particularly revealing tissue to examine
and it did turn out to be said the case University of Illinois entomology professor and Institute for Genomic Biology director Gene Robinson who performed the new analysis together with entomology graduate student Marsha Wheeler.
The researchers limited their analysis to foraging bees which are older have a higher metabolic rate
They found that those bees fed honey had a very different profile of gene activity in the fat body than those relying on HFCS or sucrose.
Hundreds of genes showed differences in activity in honey bees consuming honey compared with those fed HFCS or sucrose.
These differences remained even in an experimental hive that the researchers discovered was infected with deformed wing virus one of the many maladies that afflict honey bees around the world.
It seems that in both bees and humans sugar is not sugar--different carbohydrate sources can act differently in the body.
Some of the genes that were activated differently in the honey-eating bees have been linked to protein metabolism brain-signaling and immune defense.
I. entomology professor and department head May Berenbaum who reported that some substances in honey increase the activity of genes that help the bees break down potentially toxic substances such as pesticides.
whether these changes can affect bee health Robinson said. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
#For bees and flowers, tongue size matterswhen it comes to bee tongues length is proportional to the size of the bee
Estimating this hard to measure trait helps scientists understand bee species'resiliency to change. For bees and the flowers they pollinate a compatible tongue length is essential to a successful relationship.
Some bees and plants are matched very closely with bee tongue sized to the flower depth.
Other bee species are generalists flitting among flower species to drink nectar and collect pollen from a diverse variety of plants.
Data on tongue lengths can help ecologists understand and predict the behavior resilience and invasiveness of bee populations.
But bee tongues are hard to measure. The scarcity of reliable lingual datasets has held back research so Ignasi Bartomeus of the Estaciã n Biolã gica de Doã ana (EBD-CSIC) in Sevilla Spain
and his colleagues at Rutgers University (New brunswick N. J.)looked for a more easily measured proxy like body size.
Bee tongues are proportional to body size but modulated by family adaptations--bee families typically have characteristic tongue shapes and proportions.
The research group came up with an equation to predict tongue length from a combination of body size and taxonomic relationships.
A bee collects pollen on its body as it laps sugar-rich nectar from within the cupped interior of the flower's petals
In most species the bee's tongue is guarded by a long two-sided beak of a sheath
Perched at the mouth of a flower the bee unfolds the beaky maxilla and extends its tongue into the corolla of the flower dipping
If its tongue is too short to reach the nectar the bee has a problem.
Long flowers like honeysuckle or columbine are too deep for short-tongued bees. But longer isn't always better;
Long-tongued bees are often specialists favoring a few deep-throated flower species. In the bumblebee-sparse southern tip of Argentina for example Bombus dahlbomii the native long-tongued giant of Patagonia has lost ground
#Best for bees to be stay-at-homes: Imported bees dont do as well as localsa world without bees would be a whole lot poorer--literally.
In Denmark alone an additional 600 million to 1 billion Danish kroner are earned annually due to the work done by bees making honey
and pollinating a wide range of crops from apples to cherries and clover. Unfortunately bees all over the world are under pressure from pesticides mites viruses bacteria fungi and environmental changes among other things.
The problems often lead to the syndrome Colony Collapse Disorder which can cause whole bee colonies to fall apart.
Scientists from among others Aarhus University have now found that bees that are adapted to the local environment fare much better with regard to meeting the challenges than bees that have been purchased
and imported from a completely different home area. The scientists determined this by investigating the interaction between the genetic makeup of honey bees and their environment.
Even though quite a lot is known about the geographical and genetic diversity of honey bees knowledge of how honey bees adapt to the local environment has been limited until now.
Many beekeepers believe that it is best to buy queens from outside instead of using the queens they have in their own beehives.
However there is increasing evidence that the global honey bee trade has detrimental effects including the spread of new diseases
Productivity in beehives is measured typically by how much honey the bees produce. The desire to maximize earnings by importing bees changes the natural genetic diversity.
The question is whether commercial honey bee strains are actually more productive all things considered.
There is not much point in having a highly productive strain if it succumbs to Colony Collapse Disorder.
The studies were carried out in 621 colonies of honey bees with 16 different genetic origins. The beehives were set up in 11 countries in Europe.
There was one local strain and two foreign strains of honey bees at each of the locations.
The factors that had the greatest influence on the survival of the bees were infection with varroa mites problems with the queen and infection with the disease nosema.
It is very clear that the local bees fare better than imported ones and that they live longer.
It is not possible to point at one single factor that gives the local bees the advantage
Our results indicate that the way forward is to strengthen the breeding programmes with local honey bees instead of imported queens.
That would help maintain the bee population's natural diversity. It would also contribute to preventing the collapse of bee colonies optimize sustainable productivity
and make it possible to maintain continual adaptation to environmental changes. The research was carried out by members of the international honey bee research association COLOSS that has members in 63 countries.
The results of the project regarding the interaction between the genetic makeup of bees and their environment have been published in a special issue of the Journal of Apicultural Research
which is published by the International Bee Research Association. Scientists from Aarhus University contributed 10 of the 14 published articles.
The special issue can be found online at: http://www. ibra. org. uk/articles/JAR-53-2-2014story Source:
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