Latest Pollination Stories
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...
[Watch Video: Tactile Conditioning And Movement Analysis Of Honey Bees] April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In the early 1900s, Ivan Pavlov discovered the conditioned response, using a ringing bell and food to trigger salivation in dogs. Pavlov would ring a bell (among other stimuli) and then deliver food to the dog. The food caused the dog to salivate. After a time, Pavlov noticed that when he rang the bell, the dog started to salivate even before the food was...
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...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online When their favorite food isn’t readily available, hawk moths are able to switch to a different olfactory ‘channel’ in their brain, enabling them to learn how to find alternative nectar sources, according to a new report in the journal Science Express. The two olfactory channels allow the moths to survive in a changing floral environment and the researchers are expecting that better understanding of this mechanism will...
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Beautiful flowers and flowering plants are quite commonplace in our world, a lovely addition to the natural landscape of things. Flowers have even helped shape our history and our art for thousands of years, acting as a symbol of beauty, love and passion. Though we simply acknowledge flowers as familiar and standard, there remains one mystery about these colorful and often vibrant angiosperms: Where did they originate?...
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....
Holiday meals can be as colorful as the tree and the trimmings with recipes made with nutritious summer-fresh fruits from Chile. Tasty and festive side dishes featuring fresh Chilean fruits add color, flavor and cheer to all seasonal celebrations. Sonoma, CA (PRWEB) December 04, 2012 Holiday meals can be as colorful as the tree and the trimmings with recipes made with nutritious summer-fresh fruits from Chile. Tasty and festive side dishes featuring fresh Chilean fruits add color, flavor...
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...
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Flowers don't just catch our eyes, they catch those of pollinators like bees as well. They have to, in order to reproduce. Because plants need to maximize the opportunity for pollinators to gain access to their seeds, variations in the timing of flowering can have profound effects on flower, fruit, and seed production, and consequently agricultural yields. We know that the major driving forces of flowering are external factors such as light and temperature....
Latest Pollination Reference Libraries
Apiology is the scientific study of honey bees, a subdiscipline of melittology (the study of all bees), which is a subdiscipline of entomology. Melittology comprises of more than 17,000 species other than the honey bee. Apiology includes apicology, which is the study of honey bee ecology. Honey bees are often chosen as a study group to answer questions on the evolution of social systems. People who study honey bees are called apiologists. There have been a number of notable apiologists...
The Lily of the Nile or Calla Lily (Zantedeschia aethiopica) is a species of plant native to southern Africa in Lesotho, South Africa, and Swaziland. It has been introduced to Western Australia where it occurs in high periodical water tables and sandy soil. Several hybrids have been established and introduced to other areas around the world. Some hybrids are more suited to cooler climates. One hybrid, Crowborough, grows better in the British Isles and the northwestern United States than it...
The Souimanga Sunbird (Cinnyris sovimanga), is a small passerine bird of the sunbird family, Nectariniidae. It is native to the islands of the western Indian Ocean where it occurs on Madagascar, the Aldabra Group and the Glorioso Islands. The Souimanga Sunbird can be found in a variety of habitats from mountain forests to mangroves and scrubland as well as in parks, gardens and other human-modified ecosystems. Souimanga Sunbirds are one of the most common small land birds across much of their...
The Olive-backed Sunbird (Cinnyris jugularis), also known as the Yellow-bellied Sunbird, is an Asian sunbird. The Olive-backed Sunbird is common across southern China to the Philippines and Malaysia down to northeast Australia. Originally from mangrove habitat, the Olive-backed sunbird has adapted well to humans, and is now common even in fairly densely populated areas, even forming their nests in human dwellings. They are small songbirds, at most 4.75 inches long. The underparts of both...
The Purple Sunbird (Cinnyris asiaticus), is a sunbird that is part of a group of very small Old World passerine birds. It is an abundant resident breeder across tropical southern Asia from the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia. One to three eggs are laid in a suspended nest in a tree. This species is found in a variety of habitats with some trees, including forest and cultivation. Purple Sunbirds are tiny, only 4 inches long. They have medium-length thin down-curved bills and brush-tipped...
