Aim The future of biodiversity in increasingly warmer mountains may be poorly predicted by climate variation if dispersal affects ecological change. We assessed the influence limitations assembly mountaintop communities, focusing on relationship between proxies flight abilities and species diversity insects. Location Cantabrian Mountains, Spain. Taxon Grasshoppers (Orthoptera, Acrididae) bumble...

BACKGROUND In addition to their general role in the hydrolysis of storage lipids, bumblebee lipases can participate in the biosynthesis of fatty acids that serve as precursors of pheromones used for sexual communication. RESULTS We studied the temporal dynamics of lipolytic activity in crude extracts from the cephalic part of Bombus terrestris labial glands. Extracts from 3-day-old males disp...

Sibling care is a hallmark of social insects, but its evolution remains challenging to explain at the molecular level. The hypothesis that sibling care evolved from ancestral maternal care in primitively eusocial insects has been elaborated to involve heterochronic changes in gene expression. This elaboration leads to the prediction that workers in these species will show patterns of gene expre...

Bees use visual memories to find the spatial location of previously learnt food sites. Characteristic learning flights help acquiring these memories at newly discovered foraging locations where landmarks-salient objects in the vicinity of the goal location-can play an important role in guiding the animal's homing behavior. Although behavioral experiments have shown that bees can use a variety o...

The rapid decline in bumblebee populations within Europe has been linked to habitat loss through agricultural intensification, and a consequential reduction in the availability of preferred forage plants. The successful introduction of four European Bombus species to the South Island of New Zealand from England (in 1885 and 1906) provides an opportunity to determine how important different fora...