My picks from ScienceDaily

Wild Bees Can Be Effective Pollinators:

Over the past few years, honey bee keepers have experienced problems due to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which has hurt honey bee populations, causing some growers of fruits, nuts and vegetables to wonder how their crops will be pollinated in the future.

Bees Prefer Shortest Distance Between Two Flowers:

Insects such as honeybees and bumble bees are predictable in the way they move among flowers, typically moving directly from one flower to an adjacent cluster of flowers in the same row of plants. The bees' flight paths have a direct affect on their ability to hunt for pollen and generate "gene flow", fertilization and seed production that results when pollen moves from one plant to another.

Climate Change Found To Have Paradoxical Effects In Coastal Wetlands:

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide is largely responsible for recent global warming and the rise in sea levels. However, a team of scientists, including two Smithsonian ecologists, have found that this same increase in CO2 may ironically counterbalance some of its negative effects on one of the planet's most valuable ecosystems--wetlands.

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Aggressive African bees were accidentally released in Brazil in 1957. As "killer bees" spread northward, David Roubik, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, began a 17-year study that revealed that Africanized bees caused less damage to native bees than changes in the…
tags: Bumblebees, Bombus species, Hymenoptera, insects, entomology, natural history Common Eastern Bumblebee, Bombus impatiens. This species is often relied upon to pollinate commercial food crops, such as tomatoes, that are often grown in agricultural greenhouses. Image: Wikipedia [larger view…
tags: honeybees, insects, agribusiness, colony collapse disorder, CCD Domestic honeybee, Apis mellifera. Image: Scott Bauer, USDA, ARS. Contrary to what the cell phone alarmists would have you believe, a team of scientists recently identified a virus and a parasite that might be the cause of the…
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