bees Archives - Favorite World Press

The FWP weekly digest of wondrous wildlife happenings
and other interesting items from the natural world

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Lisa S. French

2-minute read

In celebration of World Bee Day, we’re going to look at one of the unexpected ways the planet’s hardest working pollinators go about the business of helping to keep us stocked in essential fruit, flowers, and veg.

Capable of visiting up to 1,000 flowers a day in their quest for pollen, these brainy insects use a variety of sensory capabilities to detect color, pattern, texture, and fragrance to scope out prime floral real estate efficiently.

According to scientists at the University of Bristol, bees have one tool in their pollen-detecting arsenal that may come as a bit of a shock—an electrostatic field. We humans can’t see it or feel it, but honeybees and bumblebees can perceive a weak electric field around flowers, helping them to determine which plants are the best bets for providing floral rewards.

As a bee travels through the air, it accumulates a positive electric charge. When the positively charged pollinator zeroes in on a negatively charged flower, an electric field is created that helps to dislodge and transfer pollen from flower to bee and from bee to flower.

How bees interpret and use information gathered from the floral e-field is species-dependent. Researchers believe that bumblebees perceive the strength of the force of the e-field through sensory hairs on their bodies that communicate by way of their central nervous systems which flowers will provide the best pollen pay-off. Honeybees detect e-field locations through their antennae and carry pollen source information back to the hive, disseminating news of first-rate foraging locations via an intricate waggle dance.

Given that 75 percent of food crops rely on pollinators, we are glad to learn that everybody’s favorite buzzers are equipped with all the necessary capabilities to ensure they can get the job done. Another amazing way that nature’s adaptations provide big benefits.

If you would like to learn how you can help keep these industrious e-field detectives in top form, check in with the Bee Conservancy.

ICYMI Nature News

Pollinating Tree Frogs
Uh oh, look out bumblebees! Scientists believe they may have discovered a new species of pollinator to add to the list of planetary helpers—a tiny, pollen and nectar-feasting Brazilian tree frog.

Touch-Tasting Octopuses
According to scientists at the University of Texas, octopuses use sensory mechanisms in their tentacles to taste potential food sources. So, no long sleeves for these multi-limbed marvels, then?

Extinct Animals Re-Imagined
To help draw attention to the extinction crisis, author Lucas Zellers and the Center for Biological Diversity have created a role-playing game manual inspired by 70 extinct animal species. The book is due later this year, but you can get a preview here.

Video Chatting Parrots
The University of Glasgow researchers have discovered that isolated pet parrots taught to video chat with distant bird pals gained similar social benefits to living in a flock. Polly want a video call?

More Fascinating Bird Behavior
If you think video-chatting parrots are awe-inspiring, check out what these clever winged creatures get up to in the wild as captured by the 2022 Audubon Photo Award winners.

FWP Carbon Capture Report
Happy one-year Tree-Nation tree-versary FWP readers! From April 2022 through April 2023, we are glad to report that the trees we’ve planted across 12 projects bring our carbon capture total to 3459 tons. That’s the equivalent of 8,000 barrels of oil consumed, 389,204 gallons of gasoline consumed, or 3,874,454 pounds of coal burned.

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Lisa S. French May 19, 2023

Training Bees to Detect COVID-19

30-second read

We often marvel at the brainpower of bees, because well—it’s marvelous. Despite possessing only a minuscule amount of grey matter, the essential pollinators are also clever little problem solvers capable of basic math, maze navigation, and scent memorization. According to a news release from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and as reported by the Washington Post, the industrious insects may soon be adding COVID-19 detection to their bee CVs.

A worker bee’s daily duties include quickly and accurately discriminating one scent from another to locate the best sources of pollen. Now, scientists are putting that advanced sensory skill to good use by training the insects to sniff out the coronavirus, because bees are also able to detect the very subtle scent caused by COVID infection. During training, when an infected sample is presented to the insects, researchers reward them with sugar water. After several repetitions, the bees learn to extend their tongues without receiving a reward when they detect the scent of the virus.

With early lab results showing that COVID can’t elude sensitive sniffer bees, the research team is continuing the development of the tongues-out test to train multiple bees simultaneously, as well as a biosensor to deploy the insects for early diagnosis, and ultimately a biochip utilizing bee-gene odor sensing abilities that won’t require insect deployment. These projects aim to offer low-income countries lacking in financing and infrastructure quick, accurate, cost-effective tests for the coronavirus. Once again, when it comes to problem solving, it looks like the bee team is the A-team.

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Lisa S. French May 10, 2021

Movie Night with The Pollinators

1.5-minute read

It’s almost here! Spring! Sun, longer days, tender shoots and leaves, bright little flower buds, and the joyful appearance of the fuzzy, buzzy companions of delicate blooms—bees.

If you’re like us and inclined to geek out over anything bee-related, we’ve got just the thing for your next home movie night—The Pollinators. The award-winning documentary, directed by Peter Nelson, is a fascinating and informative look into the working lives of the industrious insects, and the dedicated beekeepers who help these brainy essential pollinators of fruit and veg do what they do best—maintain our food supply.

The Pollinators is now available for viewing worldwide. Wherever you are, you can watch it here. We’ll bring the popcorn, and with continued support from their friends, the bees will bring the apples, strawberries, cherries, avocados, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, coffee beans, almonds… you get the picture.

After watching The Pollinators, you can learn more about how to befriend the bees from The Bee Conservancy. You can access free kids and classroom educational material and find out how to participate in Sponsor-a-Hive and business and corporate partnerships.

If you’re ready to help mason, leafcutter, and carpenter bees set up shop in your yard or garden, you can find bee huts at garden supply stores, and Amazon. We use the bamboo huts at FWP, and our city bees seem very happy with their digs.

Feeling motivated to go all in and become a beekeeper? The American Beekeeping Federation is an excellent all-around resource for beginners, with members in 18 countries.

In addition to helping to keep our food supply intact, we think bees are just delightful to have around. When change is the only constant, they remind us that whatever else may be going on in the world, nature is always there perking along in the background—a reassuring source of comfort and beauty. If you’ve been meditating on the calming simplicity of the natural world to help you manage the rolling stress of the pandemic, keep a lookout for the arrival of the first winged wonders and do bee zen.

Have a peaceful weekend.

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Lisa S. French March 5, 2021

To Bee or RoboBee

3-minute read

Sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;
where bees pray on their knees, sing praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them. — Carol Ann Duffy

Keep your eyes peeled, autonomous robotic bees may be coming to crop-fields near you. Measuring about half the length of a paper clip and weighing in at less than one-tenth of a gram, the insect-inspired microbots were developed by scientists at Wyss Institute to replace rapidly dwindling populations of bees, the world’s natural food crop pollinators.

While a global fleet of Robobees may sound pretty cool from a tech-wow perspective, when it comes to substituting pollinating machines for the real deal, researchers at the Centre for Agri-Environmental Research and Institute of Bee Health say not so fast. Before we roll out tiny red carpets to welcome substitute bees to the planet, according to an analysis published in Science of the Total Environment, we should consider a simpler, more holistic solution—protecting our natural pollinators and the landscapes they depend on for survival.

In the debate around bees versus Robobees, it turns out that replacing live bees with pollinating machines is not that straightforward. Bees have been honing their sophisticated sensory abilities and specialized pollination skills for over 130 million years in response to the unique shapes, scents, and colors of hundreds of thousands of flowering plants. While microbots may be capable of pollinating easy-access plants like sunflowers, the innate expertise of bees is hard to replicate across diverse crop species.

Not only are bees adaptable and super-skilled at their jobs, they also work for free, contributing between $235 to $577 billion to annual global food production. In contrast, robotic bees are pricey. At an estimated cost of $10 per microbot, replacing the billions of bees needed to pollinate crops with machine bees would run in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And unlike live bees, robotic bees need maintenance. Rather than creating a new machine-bee rental and repair industry, scientists argue that restoring pollinator habitats would be a far more cost-effective way to support food production. At a time when we are aiming to reduce our global carbon footprint, the environmental impact of manufacturing, distributing, and disposing of fleets of robotic bees could be enormous.

And bees don’t go about their important business in isolation. They’re critical components of biodiversity, helping to maintain the balance of environmental systems that support life on Earth. Replacing diverse pollinators with a single microbot is a risky business. It’s not clear what impact swarms of machine bees may have on the delicate interdependent workings of nature. The adage when you fix one thing, be careful not to break something else comes to mind.

The idea that we can address environmental problems by replacing elements of the natural world with technology-based substitutes is not a new one. As the guardians of the planet, we have the ability to transform our relationship with nature and apply innovative, emerging technologies to map, monitor, protect, and restore rather than replace. Because beyond their much-appreciated bottom-line contributions to food security, bees are iconic and beloved members of the community of life and play an important role in human culture and well-being.

How components of nature are valued depends on who is doing the valuing. We treasure these industrious insects not just for their productivity but also for their poetry. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of watching a pollen-flecked bumblebee drowse in a dahlia, we think you’ll agree that there are some things in life for which there are no substitutes. It’s just better with bees—tiny, perfect soul anchors for a world in flux.

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Lisa S. French August 24, 2020

The Flower Whisperers

2-minute read

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it — Ralph Waldo Emerson

According to a remarkable and hopeful new ETH Zurich study, bumblebees experiencing pollen deprivation resulting from climate change have learned to garden as if their hives depend on it—and they do.

Global heating is creating a seasonal mismatch between flower resources and the emergence of bumblebees in spring. No flowers, no pollen, no bees. A scarcity of the pollen that bee larvae and worker bees need to survive can negatively impact reproductive success and prevent queen bees from establishing new colonies. Heatwaves and uncommonly warm temperatures have already reduced populations by 46% in North America and 17% in Europe.

The upside (we love upsides!) is that bumblebees may be developing coping strategies to adapt to our new environmental reality, and they’re actually helping flowering plants adapt along with them. The Swiss study found that brainy bumbles have adopted a hive-saving, pollen gathering workaround to coax blooms from plants weeks ahead of schedule. By cutting distinctively shaped holes in the leaves of tomato and black mustard plants, bumblebees substantially accelerated their flowering time by an average of 30 days, approximately 25 days earlier than mechanically perforated plants. When available pollen was limited, the rate of plant perforation was significantly higher and only minor when pollen was plentiful.

Researchers believe that by helping to correct the mismatch between bloom time and hive emergence, the perforating activity of these furry little problem solvers may increase the resilience of plant-pollinator interactions to the destructive impacts of global heating. Given that about eight percent of plants rely on bumblebees for pollination, including eggplants, tomatoes, blueberries, and potatoes, we’re grateful for their efforts to bee the change.

IN SOLIDARITY

Like the flower and the bumblebee, we humans are interconnected. At Favorite World Press, we believe that our shared humanity and our faith in the strength of diverse communities are more powerful than the forces that aim to divide us.

FWP and our tree-planting partner American Forests stand in solidarity with the Black community and support organizations doing essential work to achieve social justice and ensure sustainable transformation. Because the best time to help create a more equitable world, where everyone has an opportunity to flourish, is now.

You can learn more about the mission to create a fair and just future here:

Advancement Project and the Equal Justice Initiative, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Campaign Zero .

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Lisa S. French June 6, 2020

Sweet City: Cultivating Citizen Pollinators

1.5-minute read

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature — Joseph Campbell

Cities—energizing, innovative hubs of productivity as well as stress-inducing sources of noise, pollution, and congestion that often diminish nature, negatively impacting the health, well-being, and resilience of inhabitants. Instead of depleting nature, what would happen if city planners reimagined urban living in a holistic way that promotes nature and green living by design?

When the Mayor’s office of the small Costa Rican city of Curridabat realized that the vast majority of its 65,000 citizens lived with paved surfaces that discouraged the attraction of native flora and fauna, they came up with a transformative nature-based solution for sustainable urban development—the Sweet City. Curridabat’s urban planners envisioned a naturalized city as a “sentient” space that boosts biodiversity and enhances ecosystem services by granting citizenship to V.I.P.’s—very important pollinators.

The Sweet City model recognizes that humans are not separate and distinct from nature but are members of a community of living beings that contribute to the creation of healthy, resilient, biodiverse environments.

Curridabat has reframed the role of essential pollinators, including bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and bats as prosperity agents, valuable native citizens that increase well-being and help ensure the continuity of natural systems that support fresh, nutritious food through local production. By studying conditions that help pollinators thrive, and planting trees, flowers, and community gardens that are natural attractors, the city of Curridabat is encouraging pollinating activities, increasing connectivity to nature through biological corridors essential to species conservation and improving the beauty of visual landscapes.

Naturally recovered urban space, thriving biodiversity, happy citizens—both people and pollinators. We call that a triple-win! It’s no wonder that Costa Ricans are some of the most contented humans on the planet. Apparently the pollinators are feeling pretty alright too!

You can read more about Curridabat’s sustainable development policy to increase biodiversity and protect essential urban pollinators here.

If you would like to join a network dedicated to connecting cities and nature, sign up at biophiliccities.org.

As it so happens, May is Garden for Wildlife Month, and that’s just what we’re gonna do! If you’re also feeling inspired to cultivate your own “sentient space” for pollinators, you can learn about butterfly heroes, native plants and certified habitats from the National Wildlife Federation. Sweet!

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Lisa S. French May 21, 2020

The Plight of the Bumblebee

3-minute read

Whether you look forward to the first spring flight of the bumblebee (Bombus) as a reassuring sign of nature’s capacity for renewal or are simply grateful for the fruits of the fuzzy pollinator’s labor, the recent study documenting its climate change-induced decline was a definite buzzkill. The new analysis of 66 bumblebee species across North America and Europe from researchers at the University of Ottawa and University College London reveals that over the last five decades, the growing number of unusually hot days is increasing local bumblebee extinction rates. Heatwaves and rising average temperatures have led to widespread loss of populations—an estimated 46% in North America and 17% in Europe.

Bumblebees evolved in cooler regions of the world over a period of about 100 million years, and scientists now believe that warmer winters and hotter summers resulting from global heating may exceed the iconic insect’s ability to adapt. At the current rate of emissions, it’s estimated that climate change may have greater negative impacts on the bee species than habitat loss, potentially resulting in mass extinction.

Like honey bees (Apis mellifera), wild bumblebees are important pollinators of crops and native plants, providing critical ecosystem and economic benefits for people and planet—absolutely free of charge. Both honey bees and bumblebees are accidental pollinators. In the process of drinking nectar and harvesting pollen for food, they pick up the finely-grained plant dust on their bodies or leg hair and transfer it from the anther to the stigma of the flower.

However, compared to its honey-producing cousin, the bumblebee is equipped with a few extra features that make it especially efficient at pollen gathering. Because bumblebees are bigger than honey bees, they can pick up and transfer more pollen per flower fly-by. Some species of bumblebees also have longer tongues than honey bees, not as long as this creature’s, but pretty impressive by bee standards. Longer-tongued bees are particularly skilled at lapping up nectar and pollen from hard-to-reach places in tubular flowers like honeysuckle and salvia. Bumblebees also have another expert tool in their pollen-gathering arsenal—buzz pollination, or sonication. By holding the flower with its legs or mouthparts and rapidly vibrating its flight muscles, the bumblebee can dislodge pollen from plants that can’t be pollinated through garden variety bee pollination methods. About eight percent of plants rely on this shake-and-take method of pollen gathering, including eggplants, tomatoes, potatoes, blueberries, and cranberries. In addition to its bigger size, longer tongue, and sonication skills, the bumblebee has an extended pollination season and can visit twice as many flowers per day as the honey bee.

Although bumblebees have an exceptional aptitude for pollen gathering, like many animal and plant species, their ability to adjust to the unprecedented environmental stressors of climate change is limited. Uncommonly warm winter temperatures can trick queen bumblebees into emerging from the hive well before pollen is available for food, leaving them too weak to return to the hive to lay eggs—no eggs, no bees. Come spring, higher-than-normal temperatures alter the scent, nectar, and pollen production of flowers, making them less attractive to foraging bees. And increased C02 in the atmosphere also reduces the protein level of pollen, resulting in smaller bumblebees. Smaller bees travel shorter distances, carry less pollen, and pollinate fewer flowers. To put these climate change casualties in perspective, 75 percent of the world’s flowering plants rely on pollinators for reproduction, including more than two-thirds of the world’s crops.

Unfortunately, less than one percent of bumblebee hotspots are currently protected. In a rapidly warming world, conservation aimed at maintaining habitats for the 250 species of bumblebees and assisting the insects with colonization beyond their normal range is crucial to their survival. If you’d like to help ensure that bumblebees have a soft landing wherever they roam and continue to contribute to everyday essentials, here are some tips on what to plant on your city or country patch to keep these precious pollinators buzzing:

Bumbles prefer:

Perennials because they produce more nectar than annuals
Native perennials because they produce more nectar and pollen than sterile hybrids
Symmetric two-sided flowers
Pink and violet-colored flowers

And here’s a short list of the bumblebees’ perennial favorites that you can plant from rooftop to roadside:

Daisy family (Asteraceae)
Common daisies, cornflowers, chamomile,
yarrow, fleabane, asters, dahlias, coneflowers

Flowering pea family (Fabaceae)
Lupine, mimosa, wisteria, clover

Mint family (Lamiaceae)
Sage, mint, rosemary, lavender, thyme,
lemon balm, hyssop, chaste, patchouli

You can learn more about what makes the bee bumble and how you can become a citizen conservationist from the Xerces Society and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. For a deeper drill-down into the fascinating world of bees of all sorts, we highly recommend The Bee, A Natural History.

If you’ve got access to a front, back or side yard, or any other personal patch, you can find out how to grow climate-resilient, environmentally beneficial communities of plants that you, the bees, and other wildlife will love living within the excellent Bringing Nature Home and Planting in a Post-Wild World. And if you’re a city dweller in need of some perennial planting inspiration, visit the elevated gardens at the High Line in NYC (online or in-person) created by Dutch perennial plant master, Piet Oudolf. We may have a slight hometown bias, but as gardens go, it truly is the bee’s knees.

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Lisa S. French February 22, 2020

Brainy Bees

As the days grow longer and buds burst into blooms, we’re on the lookout for the return of everybody’s favorite essential pollinator, the honeybee! If you have ever wondered why honeybees are so skilled at helping to transform flowers into fruit and veg like apples, avocados, blueberries, and broccoli, it’s because they’re wicked smart. How smart, you ask? Well, even though a honeybee’s brain is about 20,000 times smaller than a human brain, that seed-sized morsel of gray matter packs a lot of computing power. A honeybee brain is capable of managing 10 trillion computations a second—that’s 625 times the speed of most advanced supercomputers. Research conducted by scientists at the University of Melbourne indicates that honeybees can do basic arithmetic, understand the concept of zero, and learn and teach other bees how to gain rewards. All of that buzz-worthy brilliance is put to good use efficiently managing a complex series of tasks that contribute to the cross-pollination of 30 percent of human food crops and 90 percent of wild plants. Honeybees also use their smarts to locate prime floral real estate by color and smell and share the inside scoop on best bets for plentiful pollen and nectar with their hive mates through a complicated “waggle” dance language.

What’s more, these winged brainiacs are the ultimate team players, efficiently performing well-defined hierarchical functions within their colonies. The apis mellifera monarch’s, or queen honeybee’s, one and only job is to create more bees. The queen bee can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day which develop into queens, drones, or worker bees. The bees that you see buzzing about outside the hive collecting pollen and nectar from flowers are sterile female worker bees. Worker bees are also responsible for keeping the inside of the hive tidy as well as feeding the queen, drones, and bee larvae. Male bees or drones have only two functions in the hive, eating and mating with the queen. While that may sound like the good life, once a drone mates with the queen, it falls to the ground and dies. Drones that don’t make the cut with the queen are ejected from the hive by worker bees come winter.

Queen bees are not born to the throne. They are created through a process where larvae designated for insect royalty by their placement in special queen cells in the hive are fed exclusively the aptly named royal jelly. A milky substance that is secreted from glands in the heads of worker bees, royal jelly is composed of proteins, sugars, fatty acids, and trace minerals which help queens develop their reproductive capacity. Tasked with the very important job of keeping the colony humming with new offspring, a queen honeybee can live anywhere from one to six years, significantly longer than the seasonal life span of female worker bees and male drones.

Despite having an amazing capacity to problem solve and work collaboratively, one thing that honeybees have not been able to figure out on their own is how to protect themselves from the multiple factors including global heating, pesticide use, habitat loss, and parasites which have led to an estimated annual loss of over 30% of the honeybee colonies that are critical to pollinating one out of every three bites of the food we eat. According to the 2018-19 survey results from the Bee Informed Partnership, over the past winter, U.S. beekeepers lost 40% of their hives, which is the worst recorded loss since 2006.

It’s clear that when it comes to keeping global populations well-fed and environmental systems healthy and functioning, these tiny, brainy insects are the bee all end all. Whether you live in a big city, a small town, or somewhere in between, check out the Xerces Society’s tips on what to plant to create a safe haven for honeybees on your patch. You can also sponsor a hive through The Honeybee Conservancy and find Favorite World Press recommendations for pollinator-friendly seed bombs and supplies here.

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Lisa S. French May 27, 2019

How to Bee

When the days draw in, busy bees on blooming blossoms may be a distant thought, but now is the perfect time to think about ways to support our pollen gathering pals next spring. Watch this inspiring video and find out how an amazing global network of Bee Guardians are helping honey bee colonies thrive and become more resilient and get the latest buzz on how you can lend a hand to these VIPs (Very Important Pollinators). If you aren’t ready to go full-beekeeper, there are other easy, low-cost ways to Airbee-n-bee here. If you need help identifying your hard-working house guests, check out The Bee, A Natural History.

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Lisa S. French January 10, 2019