Latest Pests Stories
One of the nation’s top pest control companies is now offering discounted bee and wasp elimination services. Tinton Falls, NJ (PRWEB) May 27, 2013 As the weather gets warmer, bees and wasps will start to emerge, but thanks to a new service offered by Alliance Commercial Pest Control, residents and businesses in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania will now have the opportunity to protect themselves from the possibility of being stung. “Bees and wasps will start building nests under eves,...
New research delivers a sting in the tail for queen wasps. Scientists have sequenced the active parts of the genome – 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 -...
Emory University When fruit flies sense parasitic wasps in their environment, they lay their eggs in an alcohol-soaked environment, essentially forcing their larvae to consume booze as a drug to combat the deadly wasps. The discovery by biologists at Emory University is being published in the journal Science on Friday, February 22. “The adult flies actually anticipate an infection risk to their children, and then they medicate them by depositing them in alcohol,” says Todd...
Two parasitic wasp species show similar memory consolidation patterns in response to rewards of different quality, providing evidence that the reward value affects the type of memory that is consolidated. The full results are reported Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The researchers, led by Marjolein Kruidhof of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, tested how wasps store scents associated with situations of low reward (egg-laying into a inferior-quality host species that lays...
ST. LOUIS, April 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Spring has sprung--and that means that our lawns and gardens are waking from their winter siesta. So too, unfortunately are the bugs that love to visit and stir up trouble in the lawn, in the garden and around the home. (Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120418/AQ89979) But dealing with bugs and weeds has been made a whole lot easier this spring, with the introduction of the new Bug & Weed Identifier by Spectracide® mobile...
[ Watch the Video ] According to new research, alcoholic beverages might just be a new form of medication to help fight off parasites. Researchers reported in the February 16 edition of Current Biology that fruit flies will actually seek out alcohol to kill off blood-borne parasitic wasps living within them. They said that the discovery offers some of the first evidence that alcoholic drinks may be useful in fighting infections. "We found that environmental alcohol protects fruit...
New UA research has discovered that seed beetles from the desert Southwest shelter their broods from attacking parasitic wasps under a stack of dummy eggs They lead modest lives among the palo verde, mesquite and acacia trees throughout the Southwestern U.S., laying their eggs on seed pods and defending the survival of their offspring against the parasitic wasp species that attacks their eggs before their young can develop. They are the seed beetles Mimosestes amicus, living all around...
ST. LOUIS, Aug. 4, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Can you tell the difference between an aphid and an armyworm? How about diagnosing that circular brown patch in your lawn? Now iPhone and iPad users can get these answers and more with the new Spectracide® Pest Guide app, a free download available from the iTunes store (http://itunes.apple.com) to help users identify pests and find the solutions available to control them. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110804/CG47021LOGO) The...
Across many groups of animals, species with bigger brains often have better cognitive abilities. But it's been unclear whether overall brain size or the size of specific brain areas is the key.New findings by neurobiologists at the University of Washington suggest that both patterns are important. The researchers found that bigger-bodied social wasps had larger brains and devoted up to three times more of their brain tissue to regions that coordinate social interactions, learning, memory and...
In Australia, when crossing from one state to another, travelers may encounter a quarantine stop and may be required to forfeit recently purchased fruits and vegetables as a hedge against invasive pests. But in the U.S., crossing state lines is free wheeling, according to researchers from the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, who evaluated the threat of invasive pests to states from within the country."We concluded that the immediate threat from known invasive insect pests is greater from...
