Extrafloral nectar is the main food source offered by plants to predatory ants in most land environments. Although many studies have demonstrated the importance of extrafloral nectaries (EFNs) to plant defense against herbivores, the influence of EFNs secretory activity pattern on predatory ants remains yet not fully understood. Here, we verified the relation between the extrafloral nectar prod...

bees at two sites where hives were surrounded by dense occurrences of aloes. Nectar from this plant is considered to be important for bee honey reserves, although it is known to be dilute compared with other sources. The researchers measured the crop volumes of bees at foraging sites around the aloe flowers and also at the entrance to their hives. They found that there was no significant differ...

Most pollinators visit flowers in the search of nectar rewards. However, as the floral nectar can often not be directly detected by pollinators, many flower visitors use secondary metabolites such as odoror taste-proxies to anticipate nectar quantity and quality. Plants might exploit these sensory inferences of the pollinator to increase their pollination rates without increasing their caloric ...

Bees are model organisms for the study of learning and memory, yet nearly all such research to date has used a single reward, nectar. Many bees collect both nectar (carbohydrates) and pollen (protein) on a single foraging bout, sometimes from different plant species. We tested whether individual bumblebees could learn colour associations with nectar and pollen rewards simultaneously in a foragi...

bees at two sites where hives were surrounded by dense occurrences of aloes. Nectar from this plant is considered to be important for bee honey reserves, although it is known to be dilute compared with other sources. The researchers measured the crop volumes of bees at foraging sites around the aloe flowers and also at the entrance to their hives. They found that there was no significant differ...

Nectar yeasts are common inhabitants of insect-pollinated flowers but factors determining their distribution are not well understood. We studied the influence of host identity, environmental factors related to pollution/urbanization, and the distance to a target beehive on local distribution of nectar yeasts within Robinia pseudoacacia L. and Tilia tomentosa Moench in Berlin, Germany. Nectar sa...

One possible ecological scenario for the origin of primates is the archaic pollination and coevolution hypothesis. Its proponents contend that the consumption of nectar by some early primates and the resulting cross-pollination is an example of coevolution that drove adaptive radiations in some primates. This hypothesis is perhaps ecologically sound, but it lacks the morphology-behavior links t...

Honey bees are a model system for the study of division of labor. Worker bees demonstrate a foraging division of labor (DOL) by biasing collection towards carbohydrates (nectar) or protein (pollen). The Reproductive ground-plan hypothesis of Amdam et al. proposes that foraging DOL is regulated by the networks that controlled foraging behavior during the reproductive life cycle of honey bee ance...

In this study we tested the effect of pollen and nectar loading on metabolic rate (in mW) and wingbeat frequency during hovering, and also examined the effect of pollen loading on wing kinematics and mechanical power output. Pollen foragers had hovering metabolic rates approximately 10% higher than nectar foragers, regardless of the amount of load carried. Pollen foragers also had a more horizo...

This study was part of a large-scale monitoring project to assess the possible effects of Elado® (10 g clothianidin & 2 g β-cyfluthrin/kg seed)-dressed oilseed rape seeds on different pollinators in Northern Germany. Firstly, residues of clothianidin and its active metabolites thiazolylnitroguanidine and thiazolylmethylurea were measured in nectar and pollen from Elado®-dressed (test site, T) a...