Agricultural intensification has drastically altered foraging landscapes for bees, with large-scale crop monocultures associated floral diversity loss. Research on bumblebees and honeybees shown individuals feeding pollen from a low richness of sources can experience negative impacts health longevity relative to higher source similar protein concentrations. Florally rich are thus generally assu...

Land-use changes have threatened populations of many insect pollinators, including bumble bees. Patterns of dispersal and gene flow are key determinants of species' ability to respond to land-use change, but have been little investigated at a fine scale (<10 km) in bumble bees. Using microsatellite markers, we determined the fine-scale spatial genetic structure of populations of four common Bom...

Bumblebees such as Bombus terrestris are essential pollinators in natural and managed ecosystems. In addition, this species is intensively used in agriculture for its pollination services, for instance in tomato and pepper greenhouses. Here we performed a quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis on B. terrestris using 136 microsatellite DNA markers to identify genes linked with 20 traits includin...

Mounting evidence implicates ecdysteroids in queen-worker differentiation during the last larval instars of highly social insects. In the present study, we analyzed ecdysteroid titers in queen and worker larvae of the bumblebee Bombus terrestris from the second to the early fourth instar. B. terrestris is of particular interest because caste is already determined in the second instar, presumabl...

Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), a single-stranded RNA virus, has a worldwide distribution and affects honeybees as well as other important pollinators. IAPV infection in honeybees has been successfully repressed by exploiting the RNA interference (RNAi) pathway of the insect's innate immune response with virus-specific double stranded RNA (dsRNA). Here we investigated the effect of IAPV i...

Bees often facilitate pollination of important greenhouse crops. Individual bumblebees Bombus terrestris were therefore tested in an indoor flight arena to evaluate whether or not search time to find flowers was influenced by the inclusion or exclusion of ultraviolet radiation. Plastic model flowers of similar spectral properties to flowers of tomato Lycopersicon esculentum Mill. were used to e...

Natural selection should lead animals to use social cues (SC) when they are useful, and disregard them when they are not. Theoretical investigation predicts that individuals should thus employ social learning 'strategies', but how might such context specificity be achieved on a proximate level? Operant conditioning, whereby the use of SC is reinforced through rewarding results, provides a poten...

Host nutrition plays an important role in determining the development and success of parasitic infections. While studies of vertebrate hosts are accumulating, little is known about how host nutrition affects parasites of invertebrate hosts. Crithidia bombi is a gut trypanosome parasite of the bumble bee, Bombus terrestris and here we use it as a model system to determine the impact of host nutr...