A new study suggests that it has to do with bacteria on and in the bees’ bodies and in the food that they store in their hives. Researchers from the United States and the Netherlands, reporting in the journal PLoS One, say the most promiscuous queens have more “good” bacteria in their hives, and this […]

Some honeybees are known to be thrill-seeking adventurers — the David Blaines of their hive, so to speak. Known as scouts, they fearlessly leave their hives and search for new sources of food and new hive locations for the rest of the colony. Now, a new study suggests that these scouts have genetic brain patterns […]

Now, a new study suggests that these scouts have genetic brain patterns that set them apart from other bees. “We found massive differences in brain gene expressions between scouts and nonscouts,” said Gene E. Robinson, a geneticist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an author of the study, which appears in the current issue […]

A. “Many of the plants we see blooming at this time of year don’t get pollinated,” said Kerry Barringer, curator of the herbarium at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. “Most of them, like your winter jasmine, Jasminum nudiflorum, are not native to this area and are not adapted to our seasons and our pollinators.” When winter […]

Beekeeping can be a fairly low-impact hobby for those who are not afraid of bees, or deathly allergic to their sting. Franklin Carrier, 88, of San Jose, said amateur apiarists can spend less than an hour a month maintaining a couple of hives. Bees “can take care of themselves,” he said. “They don’t need our […]

In an abrupt about-face, the United States Department of Agriculture has decided to reverse a decision to eliminate dozens of long-standing statistical reports on a wide range of farming activities, including beekeeping, hop growing and flower farming. The agency’s statistics service said in October that it was forced by budget constraints to cut the reports […]

They were discovered not on expedition but among specimens already in museum collections. Comparing them with all other bees was made vastly easier by the Digital Bee Collection Network, a hive (if you will forgive us) of information derived from 700,000 bee specimens in a dozen different collections around the world. One of the new […]

New York City has a bee to call its own. Four new species of bee have been identified in the New York region, and one of them, discovered in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, has been given the mellifluous yet gritty name Lasioglossum gotham. A bee researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, John Ascher, […]

The two sister species, one from Coiba Island in Panama and one from northern Colombia, descend from a group of stingless bees that originated in the Amazon and moved north over millions of years, eventually to Mexico. The bees have a limited migration range, since worker bees must build a new nest before a virgin […]

SHAKESPEARE may have written “O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes,” but he apparently never met many psychologists, a good number of whom have been attempting to do exactly this for some time. Psychology and its social-science cousin, behavioral economics, seem to have a lock on “happiness […]