Bee

Bees are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their role in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey and beeswax. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea and are presently considered a clade, called Anthophila. There are nearly 20,000 known species of bees in seven recognized biological families. They are found on every continent except Antarctica, in every habitat on the planet that contains insect-pollinated flowering plants,more info:wiki

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#10  Bee,more info:wikipedia

#9  What bees can teach us about the real value of protecting nature,more info:vox

If you ask bee experts why we should worry about all those honeybees and wild bees that are famously dying off, they’ll often give a simple answer: because bees pollinate so many of our crops.

Without bees flitting from flower to flower, spreading pollen as they go, we wouldn’t have bountiful harvests of apples, berries, melons, almonds, and cherries each year. Bees are worth literally billions of dollars. If they vanished, our grocery aisles would suffer greatly.

It’s a compelling reason to care. Except, as it turns out, that’s also not the whole story. In a fascinating 2015 paper published in Nature Communications, a team of scientists discovered that only a small fraction of bee species do most of the pollinating that’s so crucial to our food supply.

That doesn’t mean all those other endangered bee species aren’t valuable — they are. There’s more to the value of bees than dollars and cents. We just have to think a little harder about a question that has occupied conservationists for decades: What makes a species worth saving?

#8  Bees learn While the y sleep ,and that means they might dream,more info:bbc

For all our obvious differences, humans and honeybees share some common threads within the fabric of life.

We are both social species. While humans speak and write to communicate, honeybees dance to one another; waggling their bodies for specific durations at angles that indicate where the best pockets of nectar or pollen are to be found outside the hustle and bustle of the nest.

But only forager bees – the eldest of several types of honeybee castes – do this. Just like in human populations, the honeybee colony is divided into different sectors of work. There are cleaners, nurses, security guards, not to mention collection bees whose sole job is to cache nectar in comb.

#7  RoundUp disrupts honey bee gut bacteria,more info:boingboing

The weed killer glyphosate, better known as Monsanto’s RoundUp, is touted by the manufacturer as a perfectly harmless herbicide. But a study led by bee experts at the University of Texas, Austin found that RoundUp leads to disruptions in the gut biome of honeybees and is responsible for the colony collapse disorder that’s plagued bees for the last decade.

#6  Common weed killer linked to bee deaths,more info:phys

The world’s most widely used weed killer may also be indirectly killing bees. New research from The University of Texas at Austin shows that honey bees exposed to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, lose some of the beneficial bacteria in their guts and are more susceptible to infection and death from harmful bacteria.

#5  THE HONEY BEE: OUR FRIEND IN DANGER,more info:fllt

In 2006, American beekeepers began noticing that their charges were mysteriously disappearing from one hive after another.

The losses didn’t stop the next year, or the next, and although the catastrophic declines have recently abated a bit, no one knows why the bees are dying or how to save them. Experts have warned that colony collapse disorder (CCD), as the phenomenon has been dubbed, could imperil our food production systems: a full one-third of the agricultural crops in the U. S. are pollinated by bees.

The little insect that shoulders most of this responsibility is the European honey bee (Apis mellifera). This relatively sleek, orange-and-black-striped, highly social animal is what we usually think of as a “bee,” and it produces the fragrant honeys and beeswax found in our markets. Like most Americans, the European honey bee is a naturalized species, having arrived on this continent with the first European colonists.

#4  To Bee or Not To Bee,more info:beblog

You might have heard reporting over the last few years that honeybees are dying at faster-than-usual rates. Over the last decade, colony collapse rates increased significantly, causing precipitous losses in the overall bee population. The consequences could be grave: in addition to providing honey, bee pollination is an important factor in agriculture, affecting major crops such as melons. squashes, and several kinds of nuts. Loss of this factor could substantially increase prices or even result in shortages.

#3  Building a backup bee The world’s largest almond grower is creating a novel replacement for the embattled honeybee,more info:thefern