While the study found that IBDS was the greatest risk factor a close runner-up was the occurrence of a so-called queen event.
Honey bee colonies have only one queen. When a colony perceives something wrong with its queen the workers eliminate that queen
and try to replace her. This process is not always smooth or successful. The occurrence of a queen event had a risk factor of 3. 1. This is the first time anyone has done an epidemiological study to repeatedly evaluate the health of the same commercial honey bee colonies over the course of a season Tarpy says.
It shows that IBDS is a significant problem that we don't understand very well. It also highlights that we need to learn more about what causes colonies to reject their queens.
These are areas we are actively researching. Hopefully this will give us insights into other health problems including colony collapse disorder.
The paper Idiopathic brood disease syndrome and queen events as precursors of colony mortality in migratory beekeeping operations in the eastern United states is published in the February issue of Preventive Veterinary medicine.
and habitat loss on plant-pollinator networksare plant-pollinator networks holding together as the insects and plants in the network are jostled by climate change and habitat loss?
or insects first appeared and almost none follow both plants and insects. Which is why biologist Tiffany Knight
and her then postdoctoral research associate Laura Burkle were delighted to discover meticulous data on a plant-pollinator network recorded by Illinois naturalist Charles Robertson between 1887 and 1916.
Recollecting 26 spring-blooming flowers from Robertson's network Knight Phd professor of biology at Washington University
Half the bee species associated with these flowers in Robertson's lifetime had disappeared some pollinators were active before their plants had bloomed plants weren't visited as often
The bees still have food plants are still getting pollinator service. But the service has declined the network's structure is weaker
The study the first to look at human disruption of plant-pollinator networks through the lens of historical data appears in the Feb 28th online edition of Science.
Robertson's astonishing legacya professor of biology and Greek at Blackburn College in Carlinville Illinois Charles Robertson collected flower-visiting insects near Carlinville between 1887 and 1916.
Over 20 years Robertson recorded visits from 1429 pollinators (including flies beetles and butterflies as well as bees) to 456 plant species. He identified
and described several hundred insects previously unknown to science. So respected is he among entomologists that roughly 20 additional species have been named for him.
Robertson's meticulous database is probably the oldest of its type for flower-visiting insects.
Before Robertson said co-author John Marlin Phd a research affiliate at the University of Illinois's Prairie Research Institute who had recollected part of Robertson's network in the 1970s almost all insect collecting was done independently of the plant.
Robertson was one of the first to record the insect the plant it was collected on to the extent possible
what the insect was doing and other factors which led to an explosion of information on insect-plant relationships.
Burkle said she particularly enjoyed the sleuthing needed to figure out Robertson's methods so that they could replicate them.
i. d. tags and his privately published book Flowers and Insects. How Robertson's network is studied doingrobertson it all Knight said.
and the insects flew for 22.5 fewer days. Because everything was compressed more there was less overlap and less time for successful pollination.
me to help collect insects around the state. In my senior year I was asked to collect bees at Carlinville to try to duplicate as much as possible Robertson's efforts.
We can't just kick these plant-pollinator networks forever and expect them to keep functioning Knight said.
#Loss of wild insects hurts crops around the worldresearchers studying data from 600 fields in 20 countries have found that managed honey bees are not as successful at pollinating crops as wild insects primarily wild bees suggesting the continuing
loss of wild insects in many agricultural landscapes has negative consequences for crop harvests. The study which prompts an urgent call to maintain
and manage pollinator diversity for long-term agricultural production is published today in the journal Science. The 50 international researchers including Lawrence Harder professor in the Department of Biological sciences in the Faculty of science at the University of Calgary analysed data from 41 crop systems around the world including fruits seeds nuts
and coffee to examine the consequences of having abundant wild pollinators for crop pollination. Our study demonstrates that production of many fruit
but that increased service by wild insects would help. Flowers of most crops need to receive pollen before making seeds
and fruits a process that is enhanced by insects that visit flowers. These pollinators including bees flies butterflies
and beetles usually live in natural or semi-natural habitats such as the edges of forests hedgerows or grasslands.
and diversity of pollinators decline and crops receive fewer visits from wild insects. The study found that the proportion of flowers producing fruits was considerably lower in sites with fewer wild insects visiting crop flowers.
Therefore the reduction of wild insects in agricultural landscapes will likely impact both our natural heritage and agricultural harvest.
Paradoxically most common approaches to increase agricultural efficiency such as cultivation of all available land and the use of pesticides reduce the abundance
and variety of wild insects that could increase production of these crops says Harder. Our study highlights the benefits of considering this paradox in designing
and wild insects will enhance global yields of animal-pollinated crops and promote long-term agricultural production.
or restoration of natural or semi-natural areas within croplands promotion of a variety of land use addition of diverse floral and nesting resources and more prudent use of insecticides that can kill pollinators.
#Wasp transcriptome creates a buzznew research delivers a sting in the tail for queen wasps.
--or transcriptome--of primitively eusocial wasps to identify the part of the genome that makes you a queen or a worker.
Their work published in Biomed Central's open access journal Genome Biology shows that workers have a more active transcriptome than queens.
This suggests that in these simple societies workers may be the'jack-of-all-trades'in the colony--transcriptionally speaking--leaving the queen with a somewhat restricted repertoire.
But how does this ancestral solitary phenotype split to produce specialised reproducers (queens) and brood carers (workers) when a species becomes social?
This paper gives a first insight into the secret lives of social insects. It shows that workers retain a highly active transcriptome possibly expressing many of the ancestral genes that are required for our solitary wasp to be successful on her own.
Conversely queens appear to shut down a lot of their genes presumably in order to be really good reproducers. Longstanding analyses based on the fossil record holds ants and wasps in a clade known as Vespoidea with bees as a sister group.
The research shows for the first time that pollinators such as bumblebees are able to find and distinguish electric signals given out by flowers.
and enticing fragrances to attract their pollinators. Researchers at Bristol's School of Biological sciences led by Professor Daniel Robert found that flowers also have their equivalent of a neon sign--patterns of electrical signals that can communicate information to the insect pollinator.
These electrical signals can work in concert with the flower's other attractive signals and enhance floral advertising Power plants are charged usually negatively
The discovery of such electric detection has opened up a whole new understanding of insect perception and flower communication.
This novel communication channel reveals how flowers can potentially inform their pollinators about the honest status of their precious nectar and pollen reserves.
While this loss of control probably has a high evolutionary cost it allows the tree to survive the insect-plant war.
which was untouched by insects when the rest of the tree was defoliated completely. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Biomed Central Limited.
and insects to move the viruses around. In contrast perennial plants in nature grow slower
#New insect: Spectacular forcepfly species discovered for the first time in South Americaforcepflies are usually known as earwigflies because the males have a large genital forceps that resembles the cerci of earwigs.
The advance toward broadening applicability of the so-called sterile insect technique (SIT) appears in the journal ACS Synthetic biology.
Luke Alphey and colleagues explain that the Lepidoptera a large family of insects with a caterpillar stage cause widespread damage worldwide to cotton;
Farmers usually battle these pests with traditional insects with little use of SIT despite its many advantages.
SIT involves mass release of radiation-sterilized insects which mate but produce no offspring thus reducing the population of pests.
They include difficulty in producing male-only sterile insects without the use of radiation which reduces their ability to compete with wild males for mates.
And in a remarkable display of longevity an original queen ant was found to be producing new ants several decades after mating sending out daughter queens throughout her 20-to 30-year lifespan.
These queen ants are mating once storing that sperm in a special sac keeping it alive
An ant queen produces genetically identical worker ants that live in the same colony and also produces sons and daughter queens.
The daughter queens after mating establish new colonies of their own. Deborah Gordon a biology professor at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment has been studying a particular population of harvester ant colonies in southeastern Arizona for 28 years meticulously recording
when a new colony rises or an older one falls. Gordon's group took the DNA fingerprint of each colony by analyzing a section of microsatellite
By pairing the genetic analysis with the long-term observations Gordon was able to determine the original queen and colony and the order in which the daughter queens and subsequent generations established new colonies.
and many of the daughter queens are not successful. The entire population--the study group consisted of about 300 colonies--relies on just a few queens to make most of the offspring year after year We don't know
whether all harvester ant populations always behave this way or whether these trends hold true for all 11000 ant species
while others eat herbivorous insects. Understanding how populations of ant colonies reproduce and expand and the rate at
Across a range of forested ecosystems we are observing widespread mortality events due to stressors such as changing climate drought insects
Vandermeer and colleague Ivette Perfecto of the U-M School of Natural resources and Environment study the complex web of interactions between resident organisms there including various insects fungi birds and bats.
which attacks insects and also helps keep coffee rust fungus in check. Both the widespread use of pesticides and fungicides and the low level of biodiversity found at sun-coffee plantations have contributed likely to the decline of white halo fungus in recent years Vandermeer said.
Its aggressive territorial behavior and ability to create huge supercolonies--consisting of thousands of queens
Visual reconstruction of the placental ancestor--a small insect-eating animal--was made possible with the help of a powerful cloud-based and publicly accessible database called Morphobank.
when you had insects chewing on the roots explains Below. With the Bt corn though you can protect the root system
Trichomes save insect from beetle predationeveryone needs to eat. But it's a dog-eat-dog world
To cope with this vicious reality a tiny insect that eats plants has learned to employ the plant's hairs for physical protection from its beetle predator.
The insect's recent invasion to the island of Guam has endangered the island's endemic cycad species. Local biologists introduced a voracious beetle predator to the island to eat the scale insects
and one of those functions is to protect the plant from insects. The glitch in this situation was that the insect that was excluded by the plant hairs was our beneficial insect that eats the scale pest
and the insect that could just walk straight through the hairs was the very pest we wished to control said Marler.
Insects that eat plants have adopted numerous strategies to avoid getting eaten. One of those strategies is to co-opt one of the tactics that plants effectively use to avoid getting eaten.
For example plants produce a plethora of chemicals that taste bad or serve as a poison to herbivores.
These chemicals are effective in deterring the feeding of most general insect herbivores. A well-studied practice by some specialist insects is their predilection to consume these plant poisons sequester those poisons into parts of their body then exploit the poisons for their own protection.
Here we find another example of how an herbivore insect can be confronted with a plant's behavior that helps reduce the likelihood of being eaten then take advantage of that behavior by using it for the same purpose said Marler.
This particular plant-pest-predator relationship has drawn the attention of biologists in the Western Pacific Tropical Research center at the University of Guam
#Grooming helps insects keep their senses sharpenedlike a self-absorbed teenager insects spend a lot of time grooming.
In a study that delves into the mechanisms behind this common function North carolina State university researchers show that insect grooming--specifically antennal cleaning--removes both environmental pollutants
and chemicals produced by the insects themselves. The findings published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that grooming helps insects maintain acute olfactory senses that are responsible for a host of functions including finding food sensing danger and even
locating a suitable mate. The findings could also explain why certain types of insecticides work more effectively than others.
Insects groom themselves incessantly so NC State entomologist Coby Schal and postdoctoral researchers Katalin Boroczky and Ayako Wada-Katsumata wanted to explore the functions of this behavior.
They devised a simple set of experiments to figure out what sort of material insects were cleaning off their antennae where this material was coming from
It is intuitive that insects remove foreign substances from their antennae but it's not necessarily intuitive that they groom to remove their'own'substances Schal says.
and ants seem to rub their legs over their antennae to remove particulates with ants then ingesting the material off their legs--the tests showed that these insects also accumulated more cuticular hydrocarbons
Leaving antennae dirty essentially blinds insects to their environment. Schal adds that there could be pest-control implications to the findings.
Finally Schal says the study can also be used as a caution to other researchers who use insects in experiments.
Gluing shut an insect's mouth to prevent it from feeding for example also prevents the insect from grooming its antennae Experimental results could be skewed
A ten-year study in forests of the American continent has resulted in the description of 24 new insect species from the Quichuana genus that are also known as'flower flies'.
and one of the authors of the study the species of the Quichuana genus are not well known as they live in tropical forest areas where insect studies are scarce.
and how a relationship has been established between the insect species and their plant development environment adds the researcher.
According to the author the discovery of this insect-plant relationship is especially important for establishing conservation methods both for these species and others that share the same development environment.
and biological control of plagues as their larvae feed on other insects that are damaging to crops
and vineyards with a greater prevalence of West Nile virus in mosquitoes and the insects'ability to spread the virus to birds horses and people.
Together the insects and birds become focal points for the disease. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Washington state University.
and maples on the University of Michigan's central campus Diag undergraduate researchers and their faculty adviser helped explain an observation that had puzzled insect ecologists who study voracious leaf-munching gypsy moth caterpillars.
These results help us understand the nutritional reasons why insects perform better or worse on different species of plants.
and forestry to improve the resistance of plants to insect pests he said. In the short term though this is basic research that is driven by the curiosity of ecologists to understand nature better.
The ability to literally walk out the door to work on tree defenses against pests like the gypsy moth coupled with an abundance of undergraduate talent makes the U-M campus an ideal location for studies in insect chemical ecology Barbehenn said.
Voles know which acorns have insect larvaeresearchers at the UPM have observed as voles are able to distinguish the acorns containing insect larvae from those that have not.
when seed are attacked by insects the fact that larva is or not inside of the acorn can modify the dispersion pattern and consequently the regeneration of these types of forests.
study suggestsin Missouri forests dense thickets of invasive honeysuckle decrease the light available to other plants hog the attention of pollinators
The parasite is transmitted through the bite of the tsetse fly a large flying insect found throughout the midcontinent of Africa that survives by drinking blood from human and animal hosts.
and insects that depend on the plants. Earlier blooming exposes plants to a greater risk of experiencing cold snaps that can damage blossoms
and near Mount Rainier where the insect outbreak lasted ten years from its onset in 1994 till the insects killed all the trees
--but also the slow and subtle changes that take place over many years including pulses of insect outbreaks.
In the satellite imagery they had found two kinds of insect signals. The first is a classic mountain pine beetle outbreak.
and Mount Rainier is the western spruce budworm an insect that moves into an area and eats the needles off the trees.
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.
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.
In orchards with a diversity of pollinators pollination service was buffered to an extent by the wild bees.
Wild pollinators can therefore help sustain pollination service under extreme weather conditions when the service by honey bees declines.
and are applied frequently insecticides are employed only in cases of acute insect infestation. Accordingly correspondingly high doses are applied discretely to fields
Although insecticides often show only short half-lives in the environment these highly toxic substances potentially enter water resources where they can be harmful to aquatic insects and other invertebrates.
This work provides wider insights into insect adaptation to host plant and opens new ways for more sustainable pest management.
The completed genome sequencing of DBM will lay a solid foundation for tracking the evolutionary mechanisms of how an insect evolves to become a successful herbivore that can defense many insecticides. said Professor Minsheng You Vice president of FAFU and leader of the research team.
and how new strategies can be developed to control insect pests. In this study researchers sequenced the genome of DBM by whole genome shotgun (WGS)
Compared with other sequenced insect species they found that the diamondback moth possesses a relatively larger set of genes
Insecticide tolerance or resistance may have contribution to the option of detoxification pathway in insect herbivores.
They identified in DBM obvious gene duplications of four gene families that participated in xenobiotic detoxification in insects including ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter families the P450 monooxygenases (P450s) glutathione
Arthropod (Phylum arthropoda) is a collective term comprising insects arachnids and crustaceans commonly referred to in the vernacular as bugs.
and the role it may play in attracting pollinators. An iridescent surface appears to change colour as you alter the angle you view it from.
It is found in the animal kingdom in insects inside sea shells and in feathers and is seen also in some plants.
Iridescence in flowers may act as a signal to pollinators such as bumblebees which are crucial to crop production.
Understanding how petals produce iridescence to attract pollinators is a major goal in plant biology. An estimated 35 per cent of global crop production depends on petal-mediated animal pollination
but a decrease in pollinator numbers across the world has started to limit the odds of pollination
Pollinators such as bumblebees can detect the iridescent signal produced by petal nanoridges and can learn to use this signal as a cue to identify rewarding flowers.
Salinity plays role in insect grazingtwenty years ago biologists Kathy Boyer and Joy Zedler then researchers at San diego State university speculated that too many insects feeding on cordgrass in the marshes of San diego bay could endanger the grass
and in turn endanger the bay wildlife that relies on it. Picking up where Boyer and Zedler left off SDSU biologist Jeremy Long is currently further exploring the dimensions of this relationship.
What he's found so far suggests that it's not a simple as saying too many insects spell death for a host plant.
Instead his research suggests a complex interplay between insects plant growth and the overall stress of the marsh environment.
These pinhead-sized insects form white protective armor that allows them to live and feed for their entire lives on a single blade of cordgrass.
Why did these insects appear to help the cordgrass grow in fresh water but not in salt water?
Back in the salt marsh he raised the salinity of select locations of cordgrass by adding locally sourced salt then repeated his toothbrush experiment in these locations brushing off the insects from some plants but not from others.
whether there's an insect infestation or not; the plant grows the same either way. Salt of the earthputting the results from all three experiments together Long concluded that salinity is a key factor in
But when the plant gets too stressed by the salt it doesn't care about the insects anymore.
and many other places where insecticide application may not be applied directly onto the hidden insects the authors wrote.
Adjuvants such as wetting agents spreaders stabilizers defoamers stickers and solvents may produce synergistic effects to essential oils by improving penetration through insect cuticle and translocation of the active ingredients within insect body.
and cottonwood trees revive insects and dormant crustaceans give respite to birds migrating on the Pacific Flyway
and resistance to insect pests and diseases but whether or not diverse forests are adapted also better to deal with drought stress remains unknown.
The grain-of-rice-sized insects are responsible for killing pine trees over tens of millions of acres in the Western U s. and Canada over the last decade.
While the findings may exonerate the insect scapegoats they should also help ecosystem managers better respond to changes in the face of climate-driven disturbances like drought and warmer temperatures.
and seed production collect insects survey mammals quantify carbon stocks and flows within the ecosystem take soil samples
and the insects that feed on them. But sugars may also be part of a deadly game of tag between plant and insect according to scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology.
Grasses and crops such as maize attach sugars to chemical defenses called benzoxazinoids to protect themselves from being poisoned by their own protective agents.
Then when an insect starts feeding a plant enzyme removes the sugar to deploy the active toxin.
After the plant removes the sugar the insect reattaches it but in the opposite stereochemical configuration.
which explains the success of Spodoptera species. Plants usually defend themselves against insect feeding by producing toxins or deterrents.
However many insects have become adapted to plant defenses and can feed on plant tissues containing toxins or deterrents without the expected negative effects.
Insects overcome plant defenses by the rapid excretion sequestration or detoxification of toxic substances Not only have contributed such adaptations to the vast diversification of insects in the course of evolution they also support the success of agricultural pests specialized on certain crop plants that jeopardize crop yields every year.
With the abundance of maize grown throughout the world it is not surprising that the crop has many insect pests including larvae of the Genus spodoptera.
In North and South america the fall armyworm Spodoptera frugiperda is an important maize pest causing considerable damage.
The free DIMBOA formed as a result causes many insects to die or cease growing but not the fall armyworm.
and Jonathan Gershenzon from the Department of Biochemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena Germany have discovered recently a previously unknown detoxification strategy in these pest insects.
We were surprised that the difference between the insect metabolite and the original plant compound was simply the stereochemical configuration of one atom.
The crucial change however is the fact that the insect metabolite is no longer reactive to the plant enzyme
The elegance of such a mechanism comes from its simplicity yet it saves the insects from being poisoned said Felipe Wouters who performed the experiments for his doctoral thesis at the institute summarizing the results.
The increasing resistance of pest insects to Bt is another reason to look deeper into the natural insect adaptations against plant defenses.
If we can better understand how much this gut enzyme has helped the fall armyworm to become such a dangerous pest on maize we may be able to use this to our advantage by impairing this insect enzyme
Plant-insect interactions involve very complex and dynamic metabolic processes. The importance of the three-dimensional structure of molecules and the stereospecificity of chemical reactions is overlooked often.
These insects can teach us humans a lot about an important chemical concept the idea that a compound
If the researchers can obtain a more comprehensive picture of how benzoxazinoids are metabolized in pest insects they may be able to design better strategies to reduce pest damage.
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