All posts tagged: Bees

Bee venom helps preserve memory in new Parkinson’s disease study

Bee venom helps preserve memory in new Parkinson’s disease study

Published by Jenni Sidey

Bee venom enhanced the effects of levodopa and carbidopa in mice with Parkinson’s-like brain damage, improving several movement measures. Mice receiving the combination maintained more balanced forelimb use and performed better in a corridor test than mice given standard treatment alone. The combination group also showed stronger recognition memory, although it already performed better before treatment, which complicates that result. The study did not measure neuron survival, dopamine, inflammation, or oxidative stress, so it cannot prove neuroprotection or show that bee venom would help people with Parkinson’s disease. A treatment drawn from honeybee venom improved movement and memory in mice with Parkinson’s-like brain damage, suggesting it may strengthen the effects of levodopa. The work remains early, however, and offers no evidence yet that the approach would help people. Researchers at the University of Guadalajara tested freeze-dried bee venom alongside levodopa and carbidopa, the standard drug combination used to restore dopamine and ease Parkinson’s symptoms. Their study appeared May 20, 2026, in the journal Neuroprotection. Parkinson’s disease gradually destroys dopamine-producing neurons, particularly those connected to movement …

Why bees are struggling to survive this summer and what you can do to help

Why bees are struggling to survive this summer and what you can do to help

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the Well Enough newsletter with Harry Bullmore for tips on living a healthier, happier and longer life Get the Well Enough email with Harry Bullmore Get the Well Enough email with Harry Bullmore You may be spotting bodies of dead bumblebees lying across pavements near you in the summer months. There are several reasons for this, some to do with the weather and some very much due to humans. Bumblebees are social, living in colonies that are maintained by very active workers with a relatively short lifespan of 4-6 weeks. This means, that in a relatively short space of time, older bees die off and to prevent disease making it’s way through the colony, the healthy young workers bring out their dead, moving them far away from their colony. Another factor is the weather. It was the warmest June on record in England (and the second hottest for the whole UK) in 2026 and other high temperatures are expected this summer. Thermal stress in bees is caused by this kind of extreme heat. Prolonged …

Why you are seeing bees struggling to survive this summer

Why you are seeing bees struggling to survive this summer

Published by skeptic

You may be spotting bodies of dead bumblebees lying across pavements near you in the summer months. There are several reasons for this, some to do with the weather and some very much due to humans. Bumblebees are social, living in colonies that are maintained by very active workers with a relatively short lifespan of 4-6 weeks. This means, that in a relatively short space of time, older bees die off and to prevent disease making it’s way through the colony, the healthy young workers bring out their dead, moving them far away from their colony. Another factor is the weather. It was the warmest June on record in England (and the second hottest for the whole UK) in 2026 and other high temperatures are expected this summer. Thermal stress in bees is caused by this kind of extreme heat. Prolonged heat exposure alters development and threatens long-term population stability. Heatwaves also severely disrupt reproduction, flight capacity and ability to forage. Social insects including bees rely on cooling behaviour for example fanning their wings when …

Worker bees help choose the next queen in bumble bee colonies

Worker bees help choose the next queen in bumble bee colonies

Published by Jenni Sidey

A baby bumble bee can end up on one of two very different paths. It can grow into a small worker that never reproduces, or become a large future queen built to survive winter and start a colony of her own. New research suggests that split is not dictated mainly by the queen. Instead, it is dictated by the workers doing the feeding. In Bombus impatiens, a common North American bumble bee, Penn State researchers found that worker bees help determine larval fate by passing along juvenile hormone in the food they make from nectar and pollen. In particular, larvae that received enough of that hormone during a narrow window late in development were far more likely to become queens. The finding shifts the picture of colony life. Rather than a top-down social order controlled by a single monarch, the study points to a more distributed system. In this system, caregivers can shape the colony’s future. “Since all these females share the same DNA, it’s a striking example of how the same genotype can produce …

Like living mood rings, these bees change color when it turns humid

Like living mood rings, these bees change color when it turns humid

Published by skeptic

app: Short for application, or a computer program designed for a specific task. biology: The study of living things. The scientists who study them are known as biologists. citizen science: Scientific research in which the public — people of all ages and abilities — participate. The data that these citizen “scientists” collect helps to advance research. Letting the public participate means that scientists can get data from many more people and places than would be available if they were working alone. context: The setting or circumstances that help explain an event, some statement or some conclusion. dynamic: An adjective that signifies something is active, changing or moving. (noun) The change or range of variability seen or measured within something. ecologist: A scientist who works in a branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. environment: The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in …

How Do Bees Choose Their Queen?

How Do Bees Choose Their Queen?

Published by Sam Flores

Bees have been around for at least 120 million years, when, Scientific American said, our own ancestors were “rat-like” creatures. You’d think that’d give us plenty of time to learn about them. But so much information about their lives – like how exactly they fly, and why they can live underwater – has only been revealed relatively recently. A new study, published in Nature, looked into how they choose their queens (the sole breeding females in the hive), too. And it may not be as simple as giving them the famous specialised “royal jelly” secretions, which many non-queen bee larvae are also fed briefly, though this certainly seems to be a part of the picture. The hive may have a “Buckingham Palace” process According to BBC Wildlife Magazine, a bee’s destiny as either a worker or a queen is determined by how it’s raised. “A worker bee is reared in one of the many thousands of identical, hexagonal, wax-walled compartments of the honeycomb,” they write. “A queen, on the other hand, develops in a spacious …

Millions of Bees Have Thrived Under a New York Cemetery for More Than a Century

Millions of Bees Have Thrived Under a New York Cemetery for More Than a Century

Published by skeptic

A morning walk through East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York, uncovered an immense colony of some 5.5 million subterranean bees. The discovery, which a Cornell University research team published in April in the journal Apidologie, documents one of the largest aggregations of these insects ever recorded. The population, belonging to the species Andrena regularis, occupies an area of about 1.25 acres and is crucial for pollination of the region’s orchards, demonstrating that historic cemeteries can prove unsuspected refuges for urban biodiversity. The Genesis of the Discovery In the spring of 2022, Rachel Fordyce, then a laboratory technician in Cornell University’s entomology department, noticed an anomalous presence of insects during her usual walk to work. After collecting some specimens, she showed them to Bryan Danforth, an entomologist at the same university. Analysis revealed that they were Andrena regularis, commonly called the mining or miner bee. Unlike honey bees, this wild species has a solitary lifestyle and nests by digging tunnels in the ground. Historical records indicate that the insect has been present in the cemetery, …

Heatwaves are destroying the sex lives of bees – new research

Heatwaves are destroying the sex lives of bees – new research

Published by skeptic

There is not yet much research on the effects of heatwaves on bees. What little there is focuses on super extremes of weather that would kill an adult bee. However, my new research with colleagues shows that UK populations of solitary bees may be much more sensitive than previously thought to the kinds of extreme weather we are now seeing regularly. To find out what happens to bees during hot weather, my team recreated the three-day UK heatwave of July 2022. We subjected a group of developing larvae of red mason bees to three days where temperatures peaked daily at 40°C. Red mason bees are common solitary bees found in UK gardens, and are important pollinators of apples and other fruits. At the same time, a control group experienced normal July temperatures for Hull, where the study was conducted, peaking daily at about 25°C. After that, we treated both groups identically and allowed them to spin their cocoons and hibernate as normal. Nine months later, all the bees emerged fine, so it appeared initially that …

Bee-inspired navigation system lets tiny robots fly without GPS

Bee-inspired navigation system lets tiny robots fly without GPS

Published by Jenni Sidey

Bee-inspired drone navigation could change how tiny robots move through greenhouses, warehouses and disaster zones. By pairing rough motion estimates with learned visual memories, Bee-Nav guides drones home over long distances, opening a practical path for smaller, cheaper autonomous flight. A drone buzzes through a greenhouse, weaving between rows of tomatoes. Another inspects a warehouse ceiling for damage. A third searches a disaster site where GPS signals fail. These scenes sound futuristic, yet one major obstacle has slowed them down for years: navigation. Small drones struggle to find their way without carrying heavy computers and large batteries. Most modern navigation systems rely on detailed maps and powerful processors, making lightweight robots expensive and energy-hungry. Now, scientists led by Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands may have found a simpler answer by copying one of nature’s best navigators: the honeybee. Their new system, called Bee-Nav, allows tiny drones to travel hundreds of meters and still return home using a neural memory as small as 42 kilobytes. The findings were published in the journal Nature. Illustration …