Latest Insect ecology Stories
Watch the video "A Dynamic Nectar Mop" April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online What do busy janitors and nectar feeding bats have in common? They both want to wipe up as much liquid as they can, as fast as they can. And it turns out, they both have specialized equipment for the job. A new study, led by Brown University, describes the previously undiscovered mechanism used by the bat, Glossophaga soricina, to slurp up extra nectar from within a flower: a tongue tip...
ST. LOUIS, May 3, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Innovative gardening tools that ensure bumper crops of vegetables for commercial growers and home food gardeners were recently featured in the April 25(th) edition of the New York Times, in an article titled Gadgets to Help Tend a Garden. According to the Times, "the future is knocking at the door of home gardening. And, if some do-it-yourselfers have their way, there is no aspect of nature that can't be improved with a rechargeable motor and a...
American Journal of Botany Ants foraging on nectar transmit yeasts that change sugar-chemistry and may affect subsequent pollinator visitations and plant fitness Ants play a variety of important roles in many ecosystems. As frequent visitors to flowers, they can benefit plants in their role as pollinators when they forage on sugar-rich nectar. However, a new study reveals that this mutualistic relationship may actually have some hidden costs. By transmitting sugar-eating yeasts to the...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A single ant colony can have thousands of ants, all scurrying around performing various tasks, maintaining their territory for the queen. And because they all look alike, studying them individually by eye can prove extremely difficult, if not impossible. To bypass this obstacle, Danielle Mersch and colleagues from the University of Lausanne tagged every single worker in entire ant colonies and tracked them by computer. The...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A swarm of killer bees attacked a 65-year-old Florida man and his dog Thursday afternoon (April 18) before turning their attention on the firefighters who responded to his 911 call for help, according to various media reports. The man, Robert Denmark of West Park, Florida, was giving his pet Ricco a bath when they were swarmed by bees from a nearby tree, reports Penny Eims of Examiner.com. Denmark attempted to spray them using a...
ARLINGTON, Va., April 18, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Bees may seem like uninvited guests at your picnic, but before you shoo them away, consider the role they play in bringing food from the field to your fork. Two recently released studies co-authored by The Nature Conservancy's Christina M. Kennedy underscore just how important wild bees are to global food production. The reports, published in the journals of Science and Ecology Letters, examined trends in insect...
University of California - Riverside UC Riverside entomologists focus on moth pheromones to explain high proportion of hybrid moths in nature An international team of researchers, including an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, has an explanation for why we see so many hybrid moths in nature. The team closely examined the behavior and the olfactory circuitry of male moths and found an answer in female-produced pheromones — chemicals generally consisting of a...
OXFORD, England, April 9, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Oxitec is pleased to announce that it has been awarded the 2013 Europe New Product Innovation Award by Frost & Sullivan, in recognition of its groundbreaking and environmentally-friendly approach to pest control. Frost and Sullivan describe Oxitec's leading-edge pest control products as "the most environmentally-friendly and sustainable approach to pest control currently available". The award was conferred after...
Bayer CropScience fosters collaboration and understanding of bee health by hosting an exhibit at the University of Minnesota. ST. PAUL, Minn. (PRWEB) April 03, 2013 In an effort to foster education and collaboration between growers and beekeepers, the Bayer Bee Care Program will travel to the University of Minnesota on April 3 as it concludes its Bee Care Tour throughout the Midwest. Held at the University of Minnesota’s Cargill Building in St. Paul, Minn., the event will bring together...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Across the US beekeepers and researchers have been reporting that a powerful new class of pesticides may be killing off bumblebees. A new study, led by the University of Pittsburgh, pinpoints another potential cause: metal pollution in flowers from aluminum and nickel. The study findings, published in the journal Environmental Pollution, reveal that bumblebees are at risk of ingesting toxic amounts of metals such as nickel and...
Latest Insect ecology Reference Libraries
The baculoviruses, are a family of large rod-shaped viruses, divided into two genera: nucleopolyhedroviruses (NPV) and granuloviruses (GV). Baculoviruses have species-specific tropisms among the invertebrates with over 600 host species having been described. Moth larval is the most common hosts but sawflies, mosquitoes, and shrimp are also known hosts. The viruses are not known to replicate in mammalian or other vertebrate animal cells. In the early sixteenth century the first records of...
The ants, one of the most successful groups of insects, are of particular interest because they form advanced colonies, and can constitute up to 15 percent of the total animal biomass of a tropical rainforest. They belong to the order Hymenoptera and are close relatives of the vespoid wasps. Ants appear in amber, found in central New Jersey, believed to be from the Cretaceous period. It is thought that they evolved from the wasps that had appeared during the Jurassic period. They are...
