Hive-bound worker bees lose sense of taste thanks to insecticides and weed killers

Tracking Bees in a Hive

Behavorial research in the study of the organisational structure and communication forms in social insects like the ants and bees has garnered tremendous impetus in recent years [1][2]. Usually, when such an experiment to study these insects is setup, the insects in an observation hive are videotaped. The hours of videotape is then manually studied and hand-labelled. This task of manually track...

Neonicotinoid insecticides and bees

Climate Change: Bees and Orchids Lose Touch

Spring temperature increases could differentially affect flowering times and pollinator flight periods, leading to asynchrony and reduced pollination. A specialist orchid-bee study combining herbarium, museum and field data shows that bee flight dates are advancing faster than orchid flowering, which could lead to significant future uncoupling.

D-Hive: Data Bees Pollinating RDF, Text, and Time

Although the problem of integrating IR and DB solutions is considered “old”, the increasing importance of big data analytics and its formidable demands for both enriched functionality and scalable performance creates the need to revisit the problem itself and to see possible solutions from a new perspective. Our goal is to develop a system that will make large corpora aware of entities and rela...

Neonicotinoid Insecticides and Honey Bees: Technical Answers to FAQs

Neonicotinoids are a class of insecticides with the same mode of action as nicotine. Examples include imidacloprid, thiamethoxam, clothianidin, acetamiprid, thiacloprid and dinotefuran. These compounds interfere with the transmission of impulses in the nerve system of insects. Similar to the naturally occurring signal-transmitting acetylcholine, neonicotinoids stimulate certain nerve cells by a...