Latest Insect ecology Stories
Stanford University For the first time, scientists have measured how successfully a queen ant establishes new colonies. The work by Stanford researchers revealed that the queen was still reproducing several decades after mating. Ants are just about everywhere you look, and yet it's largely unknown how they manage to be so ubiquitous. Scientists have understood the carnal mechanism of ant reproduction, but until now have known little of how successful the daughters of a colony are when...
Pensoft Publishers Agricultural demand for pollination is growing more quickly than the supply of honey bees, the dominant species managed for crop pollination. Increasing the efficiency of pollination represents a way of increasing crop yield without any increase in agricultural intensity or area. A study recently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (9 Jan 2013) 1, shows that the pollination effectiveness of honey bees in California almond orchards was...
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., Jan. 9, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- BeesFree, Inc. (OTC QB: BEES) announced today that it is a Bronze Sponsor for the 2013 North American Beekeeping (NAB) Conference & Tradeshow. The conference is being held January 8(th) - 12(th)in Hershey, Pennsylvania at the Hershey® Lodge. BeesFree, Inc. is the worldwide distributor of both BeesVita Plus(TM), an innovative composite nutritional food supplement for honey bees that promotes healthier honey bees and works to...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Two new species of Caribbean orchid have been discovered by a research team led by the University of Vigo, in collaboration with the Environmental Services Unit at the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park in Cuba. For over two centuries, the Caribbean islands have served as natural laboratories and a source of inspiration for botanists, including Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. The studies of these men in the tropical...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Lower numbers of ground-nesting bumblebees, which are important native pollinators, are found in landscapes with larger amounts of paved roads and impervious construction, reveals a new study from The University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Berkeley. According to the study, nesting opportunities for wild bees could be improved through reducing the local use of pavement and increasing natural habitat within the...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A United Nations-sponsored study has developed a new method to monitor global bee populations. The method, which will see regular bee counts over a five year period, should also serve as an early warning system alerting scientists to dangers threatening the world’s food and economic system. The work has been spearheaded by San Francisco State University Professor of Biology Gretchen LeBuhn. She and her colleagues, who published...
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that male mice produce a pheromone that provokes females and competitor males to remember a preference for the place where the pheromone was previously encountered. Some animals, such as moths, use a sensitive tracking system to trace airborne sex pheromones to the source, while others, such as snakes, follow trails of pheromones left on the ground. A team from the University's Institute of Integrative Biology has discovered that mice...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online According to new research from a pair of Swiss researchers, queen sweat bees influence the adult size of their daughters based on which brood they are born into. During the initial observation period of the study, the researchers noted that first brood females were always smaller than second brood females, but first brood males are sometimes the same size as males from the second brood. The queen bees were found regulating the...
Pensoft Publishers A combined team of scientists from Europe and South Africa (Luísa G. Carvalheiro (University of Leeds, UK & Naturalis Biodiversity Research Centre, Netherlands), Colleen Seymour and Ruan Veldtman (SANBI, South Africa) and Sue Nicolson (University of Pretoria) have discovered that pollinator services of large agriculture fields can be enhanced with a simple cost-effective measure, that involves the creation of small patches of native plants within fruit orchards....
How flowers have evolved particular colors, shapes and scents to attract pollinators has long fascinated ecologists. Now, using artificial flowers and high-speed video, researchers have gained intriguing insights into the intimate relationship between hummingbirds and the flowers they pollinate. The study, published in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology, is the first to measure how much energy hummingbirds use while hovering to feed from flowers of different...
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...
