I love this video of Euglossine bees pollinating the brazilian orchid, Catasetum macrocarpum.
Hat tip to Bug Girl who pointed out a press release on Science Daily describing a bee inventory project by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History.
"Scientists have discovered that there are more bee species than previously thought. In the first global accounting of bee species in over a hundred years, John S. Ascher, a research scientist in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, compiled online species pages and distribution maps for more than 19,200 described bee species, showcasing the diversity of these essential pollinators. This new species inventory documents 2,000 more described, valid species than estimated by Charles Michener in the first edition of his definitive The Bees of the World published eight years ago."Click the link above to read more! Just another reason why inverts rule and verts drool. Photo from Cid*'s Flickr Photostream.
OMG! The Honey Copter Tee is only 5 bucks at The Cotton Factory, my favorite place for ridiculous nerdy t-shirts.
Editors note: Since Eric started this whole bee thing. I am posting this press release I wrote as part of a writing exercise for a job application for the NAS.
Extensive bee decline has the agricultural community in a panic. Bees are responsible for pollinating many crops and provide a service to the industry estimated at $15 billion a year. Diane Cox-Foster, professor in the Entomology Department, Penn State, and colleagues report in the journal Science a correlation between this decline, called colony collapse disorder (CCD), and Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV).
CCD is diagnosed by an inexplicable disappearance of adults, leaving honey, pollen and grubs behind. Surveys detailed a loss of 50-90% of commercial bee colonies. The first reported declines were in 2004, corresponding to when the U.S. allowed imported bees from Australia. This study is the first report of IADV in the United States.
The study’s authors report that IAPV was only found in CCD hives and from Australian samples, but caution this may be part of a multifaceted attack including parasites, poor nutrition, pesticides and environmental stressors. Future research will study the role of IAPV in CCD in relation to these stressors.
The National Research Council report Status of Pollinators in North America concluded that populations of North American pollinators are in rapid decline. More than three-quarters of commercially important flowering plants need pollinators for fertilization. The honeybee is responsible for pollinating over 90 crops. Causes for the decline are difficult to determine due to inadequate data. The report recommended establishing a network with Canada and Mexico to form long-term monitoring projects, along with a comprehensive survey to gather baseline data for future population assessments.
• NRC Report Status of Pollinators in North America
Other Resources:
• NAS press release: Some Pollinator Populations Declining; Improved Monitoring and More Biological Knowledge Needed to Better Assess Their Status
• Cox-Foster et al. (2007) A Metagenomic Survey of Microbes in Honey Bee Colony Collapse Disorder. Science 318 (5848): 283-287. Doi: 10.1126/science.1146498
• AAAS teleconference with study’s coauthors (teleconference begins around three minute mark)
Now new Open Access research published in PLoS One looks at “international” communication capabilities between two species of honeybee: the eastern or asian honeybee, Apis cerana and the Western or European honeybee, Apis melifera. There are several species of honey bees that have been studied and each was observed as having a different dance style. To eliminate as many uncontrolled variables (primarily season, time, spatial scales, wind and geography of separate experiments) as possible, and be able to directly compare two species, a team of scientists from Australia, China and Germany creative a single hybrid hive with an A. cerana queen and a mixed worker population. They tried colonies with an A. melifera queen but in those colonies the A. cerana workers were killed and removed from the hive within 3 days. Even in the A. Cerana queened hybrid hives the team sometimes had to use active measures to keep the hive harmonious including spraying agitated bees with sugar syrup and honey water and removing troublemakers. Without active controls the hybrid hives lasted 20 days before the introduced workers were all killed or driven out, with active control the hives lasted in excess of 50 days. The harmonious hybrid hive also showed food transfer (trophollaxis) between species and mixed species workers tending the queen when she was laying eggs.
The researchers found that each species did have a distinct “dialect” primarily expressed in the duration of waggle to distance relationship. A. cerana bees waggled their butts significantly longer than A. melifera for all distances of food from the hive in both single species and hybrid hives. The team continued to evaluate understanding between the two species and found that the workers from either species were able to understand the dance of foragers regardless of the “dialect” of the dance and that the A. cerana were more likely to follow any successful forager than A. melifera. Both the direction and distance to the food source were accurately communicated between species.
Whats cool is that, as the researchers point out, this might be a social learning situation. Interspecific communication and potentially interspecific learning. It may be that if a longer term experiment can be successfully conducted, the two species of bees waggle durations may converge over a longer period.
Su, S., Cai, F., Si, A., Zhang, S., Tautz, J., Chen, S., Giurfa, M. (2008). East Learns from West: Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees. PLoS ONE, 3(6), e2365. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002365
A friend sent me this webpage from Dark Roasted Blend on Glamorous Insects. Though they are not all insects, these unbelievable macro photos are better than National Geographic quality. I will steal one just to get you to go over there and see the rest! I really love the mantids.
The Annotated Budak has the 25th edition of the Circus of the Spineless. I must say that his writing up of all the submissions was captivating and certainly made my post on ant-mimicking spiders more appealing than I ever could! Just to read his poetic wording of the posts is reason enough to head over. The fact that its the Circus of the Spineless, which highlights the last months invertebrate postings... well, I am ashamed you are still reading this!
They are so great but here are three I really liked:
Bad Day for a Beetle at the Annotated Budak
Painted Jezebel: Distasteful to birds? at the Bird Ecology Study Group (Singapore)
That Crab Has Flies at Evolgen
I leave you with this totally awesome photo submitted by Jennifer Forman Orth of the Invasive Species Weblog.
