Snapping shrimp, naked mole rats, ants, honeybees, and humans – what do they all have in common? They all share a similar colony-like organizational system that biologists have termed eusociality. Eusocial species have been remarkably successful in both surviving and thriving through the use of colony-level cooperation. One cooperative behavior used by all eusocial species […]
The scientists who discovered that urban bees are using plastic bags and building sealant to construct hives say it demonstrates bees’ resourcefulness and flexibility in adapting to a human-dominated world. The study, published in the journalEcosphere, was carried out by University of Guelph researchers Scott MacIvor and Andrew Moore. MacIvor says it’s an important discovery […]
Hoping to gain insights into what’s needed for creating artificial intelligence, scientists from the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex are embarking on a project to produce a computer simulation of a honeybee brain. The team said they will build models of the systems in the brain that govern a honeybee’s vision and sense of smell. […]
One-in-20 honey bees are thrill seekers, say University of Illinois entomologists who have identified distinct patterns of gene activity in the same molecular pathways known to be associated with thrill-seeking in humans. Their study, published in Science, suggests that thrill-seeking is not limited to humans and other vertebrates and that novelty seeking is an important […]
Bees prefer nectar containing nicotine and caffeine over nectar without these substances and researchers from the University of Haifa think this could be an evolutionary development intended, as in humans, to make the bee addicted. Researcher Ido Izhaki explained that flower nectar is primarily comprised of sugars, which provide energy for the potential pollinators. But […]
Honeybees can discriminate between patterns containing two and three dots – without having to count the dots, a research team reports in the journal PLoS ONE. And, with a bit of training, the bees can learn to tell the difference between three and four dots. However at four, bee maths seems to run out. The […]
The cause of the widespread decline in pollinating bee populations has still not been explained, but new research published in the journal PLoS ONE has revealed an alarmingly rapid spread of disease from commercial bees to their wild pollinating cousins. Researchers Michael Otterstatter and James Thomson, from the University of Toronto, provide evidence that commercially […]
