Bees

Wild bumblebees are key pollinators of crops and wild plants that rely on the continuous availability of floral resources. A better understanding of the spatio-temporal availability and use of floral food resources may help to promote bumblebees and their pollination services in agricultural landscapes. We placed colonies of Bombus terrestris L. in 24 agricultural landscapes with various degrees of floral resource availability and assessed different parameters of colony growth and fitness. We estimated pollen availability during different periods of colony development based on detailed information of the bumblebee pollen diet and the spatial distribution of the visited plant species. Total pollen availability did not significantly explain colony growth or fitness. However, when using habitat maps, the weight gain of colonies, the number of queen cells, and colony survival decreased with increasing distance from the forest. The better explanation of bumblebee performance by forest proximity than by (plant-inferred) pollen availability indicates that other functions of forests than pollen provision were important. The conservation of forests next to agricultural land might help to sustain high populations of these important wild pollinators and enhance their crop pollination services. Combining different mapping approaches might help to further disentangle complex relationships between B. terrestris and their environment in agricultural landscapes.

In a first, scientists have created a global distribution map for bees, analysing nearly 6 million public records of where individual species have appeared around the world. The project, published in the journal Cell Biology, found that bee diversity is higher in the Northern Hemisphere than in the…

Plant a bee-friendly garden with the #ProudToBee initiative! Learn about the importance of pollinators in your community at bit.ly/proudtobee

Proud to Bee a 4-H'er is made possible thanks to @syngentacanada pic.twitter.com/YLgQE73Lg5

Fake honey is an enormous economical burden on beekeepers and consumers around the world. Adulteration methods are becoming more and more sophisticated. Besides the old-fashioned scams of real honey getting diluted or replaced by syrup, new tricks show up, for example pollen getting blended into syrup, chemical alteration of syrup to confuse tests, fake honey traveling through a number of countries to mask its country of origin, or a combination of these methods. Since the adulterated honey does not pose a risk to consumer’s health, government enforcement to detect and punish honey adulteration has not been very strong. So far, authenticity tests are mostly left to the private sector and the honey industry.

Global honey bee populations are in decline, putting the world's food supply under pressure. But new technologies could help beekeepers counter the threat.

Importing bees is a challenge Rod Scarlett knows well. When most international flights stopped in March, thousands of queen bees were stranded abroad, and Scarlett, the executive director of the Canadian Honey Council, had to figure out how to get them to Canada on time. “The early spring is when we…

New research seems to affirm that wild bees, like bumblebees, mason bees and squash bees, are more essential to many agricultural crops in Pennsylvania than previously thought. After surveying the impact of wild bees at 131 farms in Pennsylvania, California, Florida, Michigan, Oregon and Washington, and…

A lack of wild bees and managed honeybees is limiting pollination and yields for certain crops on farms in British Columbia and across the United States, a collective of researchers has found.

GROPRO announces launching a new Bio-Stimulant - 'Awakening Pollination' - which stimulates the plants' natural processes to enhance flower development while increasing stamen hold and pollinator activity. This in turn increases total flower pollination ensuring overall plant yield increases. The primary…