All posts tagged: Bees

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 …

What AI taxis and robots can learn from bees

What AI taxis and robots can learn from bees

Published by skeptic

Even advanced technology can struggle when the real world becomes unpredictable. In April 2026, a Waymo robotaxi in San Antonio, Texas, drove into a flooded lane during severe weather, prompting the company to recall about 3,800 vehicles for a software fix. No one was injured, but the incident exposed a deeper challenge: intelligence is not just about processing data. It is about knowing where to look, what to notice, when to act and how to use previous experience when conditions change. AI researchers are now looking at bees and other insects to help them design machines and robots that can make better decisions. My research explores how bees learn, from identifying simple visual patterns to mastering high-level concepts, and how they adapt their behaviour when conditions change. By combining behavioural experiments, neural recording (for example, measuring signals from the brain) and neuromorphic computing (an approach to computing inspired by the animal brain), my goal is to uncover the biological code that allows tiny brains to navigate a complex world and make efficient decisions. I have …

Bees have coexisted with us for over a millennium. Their name remains a mystery : NPR

Bees have coexisted with us for over a millennium. Their name remains a mystery : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

Bees in a hive in San Diego, Calif. Beekeeping has been a practice for thousands of years. Alan Nakkash for NPR hide caption toggle caption Alan Nakkash for NPR When Kendal Sager lifts the top of her beehive, tens of thousands of bees waggle across the honeycomb — their cells filled with bright yellow, orange and pink pollen collected from flowers in Sager’s neighborhood. Sager, a California master beekeeper, said bees do far more than produce that sweet substance: they pollinate crops for hundreds of types of nuts, fruits and vegetables. “Even if you don’t like bees themselves, you have bees to thank for the food on your table,” she said. This Wednesday is World Bee Day, which was established by the United Nations in 2018 to raise awareness about the need to protect the insects. So this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week looks at the mystery behind bees’ buzzy name — and why they need more of our attention than ever. Kendal Sager is also the founder of Sager Family Farm, which …

Worker bees have power to pick their queen

Worker bees have power to pick their queen

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. While every bumble bee colony has a queen, the process for becoming that queen bee may be a bit more democratic than monarchical. The worker bees appear to select which baby will be queen one day, according to a new study published in the journal Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The key to this selection process lies in the juvenile hormone. This hormone in insects is responsible for their development, molting, and eventual reproduction. When the team gave the juvenile hormone to worker bees, they passed it along to all of the larvae in the colony through feeding. The more juvenile hormone the larvae received, the more likely they were to become queen.  According to the team, this is the first study to show that bumble bee caste is determined by the workers and shifts our understanding of bee colony dynamics. Instead of a top-down hierarchy, the colony appears to be a more decentralized system, where the caregivers and …

how bees support other animals

how bees support other animals

Published by skeptic

The importance of bees for pollinating wild plants and crops is well known. If we lose the bees, we lose our food. But this is only part of the picture. Bees also support a hidden network of other species, sometimes as mutual partners, sometimes as prey, sometimes as other unwilling victims. Many organisms depend on bees for survival, and many of these interactions are not mutually supportive. Some predators focus on bees, for example bee wolves (Philanthus triangulum), capture bees to feed their young in their underground nests. Crab spiders, also known as the white death spider, are often found camouflaged on the top of flowers. They wait for bees to sip on some nectar and then the spider consumes the bee, and afterwards vomits the corpse back up. It’s not just insects, vertebrates depend on bees too. Birds such as bee‑eaters and great tits, as well as some species of bat consume bees as part of their diet, while badgers and foxes often raid nests for larvae and honey. And, of course, humans have …

How well do you know your garden bees?

How well do you know your garden bees?

Published by Daniella Wilson

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Can you tell your average buff-tailed bumblebee from its murderous cuckoo relative? Do you know which bees can sting and which can’t, or which are likely to live in a bee hotel or make their nests underground? In the run-up to World Bee Day (on May 20), which aims to raise awareness of the importance of pollinators for food security, biodiversity, and ecosystem health, perhaps it’s time to observe the bees that visit your garden more closely and consider planting some of their favourite plants. Anyone who doesn’t really know what they’re looking for may want to bag a copy of The Bee Spotter’s Guide by bee expert Dave Goulson, founder of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and professor of biology at Sussex University. Bees live …