Remotely monitoring honeybee hives can help track the health of the colony.
weter78/ Shutterstock
Remote sensors allowed us to observe the in-hive activities of honeybees, which could be key to keeping bee colonies worldwide healthy.
Foraging bees are exposed to a cocktail of toxic chemicals in the environment.
Pixabay
The world’s most widely used herbicide poses a threat to honey bees.
Avocadon’t?
Nataliya Arzamasova/Shutterstock
You have to draw an ethical line somewhere so if you were vegan, would you still eat avocados?
Honey bees on a beekeeper’s hive.
Nick Wood/flickr
All too often the media buzz is centred around the managed honeybee, at the expense of other wild bee species.
Myrmecocystus honeypot ants, showing the repletes, their abdomens swollen to store honey, above ordinary workers.
Greg Hume via Wikimedia Commons
Honey might be synonymous with bees, but they’re not the only insects that come up with the goods.
Fake honey products have been found in Australia.
hounddiggity/Flickr
Australia’s largest honey producer has been accused of selling fake honey. But what is fake honey – and why has it only been found now?
Beehive fences can help improve human-elephant coexistence.
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There is indeed merit to using beehives to keep elephants from eating and destroying crops.
A honey bee sniffs a cherry blossom.
AP Photo/Patrick Pleul
Pollination by commercially raised bees is important to a variety of crops but none more than California almonds. In turn, beekeepers depend on them.
How do you look to a bee? A face shown through a “bee eye” camera.
A. Dyer and S. Williams (RMIT)
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.
Australian plants leave a unique pollen signature in our honey.
Renee/Flickr
Australia’s distinctive native plants give our honey a distinctive stamp. Welcome to melissopalynology: the study of pollen.
Soybean seeds treated with neonicotinoids (blue) and treated corn seeds (red) versus untreated seeds.
Ian Grettenberger/PennState University
US farmers are planting more and more acres with seeds coated with neonicotinoid pesticides. An ecologist explains why this approach is overkill and may be doing more harm than good.
Bees live in complex environments, and make lots of decisions every day that are crucial for survival.
from www.shutterstock.com
The Romans may not have had a symbol for zero, but bees understand what it means beyond just the simple assumption “there’s nothing there”.
A bee visits an almond flower – an essential process for almond farmers.
Tiago J. G. Fernandez/Wikimedia Commons
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.
Wild bumble bees provide natural pollination for blueberries in North America.
John Flannery
Honeybees receive a lot of attention, but the first North American bee to be listed as an endangered species is a wild bumble bee. Wild bees are vital pollinators, and some are declining rapidly.
Szefei / www.shutterstock.com
Honeybees are responsible for only a third of crop pollination in Britain.
A giant swallowtail butterfly feeds from the flower of an alternate-leaved dogwood.
(Nina Zitani)
We’re in the middle of an Insectageddon. But a garden of native plants can help insects, as well as birds and other wildlife.
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Hoverflies are helping spread disease among the already declining bee population.
Flowers may take advantage of visual illusions to attract bees.
from www.shutterstock.com
To learn about how humans, animals and insects experience vision illusions, we had to find a way to ask bees what they saw.
Bees living in cities often have to seek out green space like parks, ravines and gardens. Green roofs could offer them some habitat.
(Shutterstock)
Urban bees deal with what’s known as “habitat patches,” discontinuous patches of green like gardens, parks and ravines. Green roofs could offer relief to bees dealing with habitat fragmentation.
Ivar Leidus (Iifar) / Wikimedia Commons
Bees need pollen to survive and grow, but not all plants can provide the right mix.