What’s the News: We’ve all probably heard the myth, made popular by Disney’s Dumbo, that elephants are afraid of mice. While that idea may not be exactly true (video), elephants do make sure to avoid another tiny critter: bees. Knowing this, zoologists from the University of Oxford loaded fences in Kenya with beehives, in hopes of deterring roaming African elephants from eating or trampling farmers’ crops. Now, two years later, the researchers are reporting in the African Journal of Ecology that the novel barriers are working wondrously and could be a viable option for protecting African croplands.
What’s the News: The next generation of bomb detectors may come from an unusual source: bee venom, the stuff that hurts like all get-out when you get stung. A team of researchers at MIT have used fluorescent carbon nanotubes and venom proteins called bombolitins that bind to single molecules of explosives like TNT to create an exquisitely sensitive detector.
What’s the News: It’s long been known that a female bee’s place in the social order—whether she becomes a worker or a queen—depends not on her genes, but on whether she eats royal jelly. A study published in Nature found that royalactin, a protein found in royal jelly, is responsible for many of the physical differences that distinguish queens from the hoi polloi of the hive—and, surprisingly, that royalactin can even cause fruit flies to develop queen bee-like traits. This finding also shines light on how, at a cellular level, royal jelly turns bees into queens.
Don’t you forget about bumblebees. While DISCOVER and others have extensively covered the mysterious colony collapse disorder that’s been crashing honeybee populations around the world, bumblebees have not escaped the tide of doom.
Sydney Cameron leads a team that just published a new study of bumblebees in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and tallied up some scary numbers.
The relative abundance of four species of bumble bees over the past few decades has dropped by more than 90%—and those disappearing species are also suffering from low genetic diversity, which makes them that much more susceptible to disease or any other environmental pressures. [TIME]
In addition, the geographic ranges of those species shrunk precipitously—between 23 and 87 percent, depending upon the case. That reduction in range could have catastrophic impacts on agriculture:
More trouble for bees: A study out in the open-access journal PLoS One finds that viruses that previously had been the bane of domesticated honeybees have spread to wild pollinators.
A pattern showed up in the survey that fits that unpleasant scenario. Researchers tested for five viruses in pollinating insects and in their pollen hauls near apiaries in Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois. Israeli acute parasitic virus (IAPV) showed up in wild pollinators near honeybee installations carrying the disease but not near apiaries without the virus. In domestic honeybees, such viruses rank as one of the possible contributors to the still-mysterious malady known as colony collapse disorder that abruptly wipes out a hive’s workforce, [study author Diana] Cox-Foster says. [Science News]
Do bees prefer certain colors or shapes in the flowers from which they forage? And can they learn on the fly to go to certain colors or shapes that prove to be more lucrative?
That was the question for the students of Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. And by devising a clever experiment to find out, these kids became the youngest authors ever to have a study published in a journal of Britain’s Royal Society.
Their paper, based on fieldwork carried out in a local churchyard, describes how bumblebees can learn which flowers to forage from with more flexibility than anyone had thought. It’s the culmination of a project called ‘i, scientist’, designed to get students to actually carry out scientific researchthemselves. The kids received some support from Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at UCL, and David Strudwick, Blackawton’s head teacher. But the work is all their own.
The class (including Lotto’s son, Misha) came up with their own questions, devised hypotheses, designed experiments, and analysed data. They wrote the paper themselves (except for the abstract), and they drew all the figures with colouring pencils.
Honeybees usually get about eight hours of sleep a night (lucky things!), but what happens when evil researchers keep them up all night?
The first study of sleep in bees, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the tired bees lag just like sleep-deprived humans do. Too bad bees don’t have coffee. Says lead researcher Barrett Klein:
“When deprived of sleep, humans typically experience a diminished ability to perform a variety of tasks, including communicating as clearly or as precisely. We found that sleep-deprived honey bees also experienced communication problems. They advertised the direction to a food site less precisely to their fellow bees.” [Daily Mail]
So how do you keep bees awake when they don’t need to cram for a calculus final? You make them magnetic. Klein attached a piece of either steel or non-magnetic metal to the bees’ backs. Then all through the night, the researchers swung a magnet over the hive three times a minute–a device they call the “insominator.” This jostled the bees with the magnetic steel on their backs and kept them from sleeping.
UPDATE: Fortune reports today that the lead researcher on this study, Jerry Bromenshenk, had financial ties to Bayer Crop Science—including a research grant—that were not disclosed. Bayer makes pesticides that some beekeepers and researchers have cited as a possible cause of colony collapse disorder, and Bromenshenk’s conclusions in this study could benefit the company. Bromenshenk says the money did not go to this project or influence its findings.
Viruses. Mites. Fungi. Genetically modified crops. Inbreeding because of industrial agriculture. They’ve all been floated as possible causes of colony collapse disorder (CCD), the mystery affliction that’s been wiping out honeybees, and by doing so threatening the agricultural industries that rely on those insects. Despite the flood of reports since 2006 about these suspects (and more absurd ones, like cellphone radiation disorienting the bees), the bee die-off continues without a clear explanation.
A study out this week in PLoS One points the finger in a new direction. What’s interesting about this explanation is its contention that there’s tandem foul play at work in CCD—two of the suggested culprits could be working together. But the mystery isn’t solved just yet.
It took Turkish bees to make Israel flow with milk and honey.
When archaeologist Amihai Mazar and colleagues turned up 3,000-year-old remains of hundreds of preserved beehives from the ancient town of Tel Rehov in 2007, it was the first confirmation of the ancient beekeeping suggested by Egyptian paintings and Biblical references. Now, three years later, the team has published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with the analysis of the “honeybee workers, drones, pupae, and larvae” found inside those hives. Surprise—they’re from Turkey, hundreds of miles away.
The findings “would imply an incredible amount of commodity trading of bees,” said bee expert Gene Kritsky of the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, editor of American Entomologist. The importation of Italian bees to the United States in the 1860s “was thought to be a big deal then,” he said, “but the Israelis may have been doing this as far back as the first millennium BC” [Los Angeles Times].
When it comes to the relationship between bees and African elephants, size does not matter. The massive pachyderms are terrified of bees, which can painfully sting elephants around their eyes and inside their trunks. Baby elephants are the most vulnerable to bee stings, as their skin isn’t thick enough to ward off the insects. And researchers have now found that the elephants have developed a special strategy to help them avoid these bees that scare the bejesus out of them.
When an elephant takes note of a swarm of bees, it emits a distinct rumbling call. This bee alarm, which the scientists termed a “bee rumble,” helps draw the herd’s attention to the bees and allows them to run off unharmed, the researchers write in the journal PloS ONE. What’s more, they respond to an audio recording of the bee rumble as if it were the real thing, giving farmers a tool they could potentially use to fend off unwanted elephants.
This spring, many beekeepers across America opened their hives and found ruin within. At a time when they should have been buzzing with activity, the hives were half-empty, with most adult bees having flown off to die. A new federal survey indicates that 2010 has been the worst year so far for bee deaths. Another study suggests that pesticides might be to blame for the mass wipeout of adult honeybees.
This winter’s die-off was the continuation of a four-year trend. At any given point, beekeepers can expect to see 15 to 20 percent of their bees wiped out due to natural causes or harsh weather. But this alarming phenomenon, termed colony collapse disorder (CCD), has seen millions of bees perish in a mysterious epidemic, with some farmers losing 30 to 90 percent of their hives.
As for the cause of this epidemic, experts say their best guess is that many factors are combining to sicken bees, with the list of culprits including parasites, viruses, bacteria, poor nutrition, and pesticides. Now a new study published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE strengthens the case for pesticides’ culpability.
In leafcutter ants and honeybees, it’s survival of the fittest sperm. Biologist Boris Baer, for a study out this week in Science, investigated these two species because of their peculiar sexual practices: In one day, the queen acquires all the sperm she’ll need to fertilize her eggs over the course of her lifetime. But in the race to be the top genetics-spreader, the males have evolved a dirty trick. Their seminal fluids actually do battle within the female’s reproductive tract.
To test out the idea, Baer and colleagues exposed the sperm of the bee and ant males to their own seminal fluid, and also to that of other males of the same species. The seminal fluid killed more than 50 per cent of the rival sperm within 15 minutes. “The males seemed to use the seminal fluid to harm the sperm,” says Baer [New Scientist]. When the team studied other organisms whose lifestyle didn’t depend on this kind of polyandry, they didn’t see the same effect.
Scientists have long wondered what exactly is killing bees in hives afflicted by colony collapse disorder (CCD), and now they may have found a clue. Bees in collapsing hives showed evidence of damaged ribosomes, which are crucial to protein production, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The researchers suggest that an onslaught of viruses may be responsible for the cellular damage.
The findings suggest that CCD, which has been blamed on everything from viruses to fungi to pesticides, may be linked to problems with protein production that could make bees more susceptible to these threats. “If your ribosome is compromised, then you can’t respond to pesticides, you can’t respond to fungal infections or bacteria or inadequate nutrition because the ribosome is central to the survival of any organism. You need proteins to survive” [AP], said lead researcher May Berenbaum.
Orchids have a clever way of attracting pollinators: By releasing the same pheromones honeybees give off to communicate with other hive-members in times of emergency.
[T]he bees are the favorite food of the larvae of Vespa hornets…[so] when the orchid Dendrobiumsinense sends out these false alarms, the hornets pounce on the petals, thinking they’ll bring a bee dinner home to the kids [Scientific American]. The hornets leave hungry, but they help out the orchids in the process.
Japanese giant hornets can wreak havoc on a hive of Japanese honeybees, slicing off the heads of worker bees, feeding on the hive’s honey, and carrying back the larvae to feed to their own young. But the native bees do have one effective defense against the giant marauders, and it’s a battle plan that uses the bees’ one clear advantage: numbers. When a hornet scout appears, hundreds of bees instantly swarm around the invader in what’s known as a “bee ball.” In a new experiment, researchers say they’ve determined exactly how the bee ball kills.
Previously, scientists thought that the heat generated by the mass of vibrating bees killed the hornet. But in the study, published in the journal Naturwissenschaften, researchers found that temperature alone can’t do the trick. The hornets “can survive for 10 minutes at a temperature up to 47C (or 116 degrees Fahrenheit), and the temperature inside the bee balls does not rise higher than 46C” [BBC News], says lead author Fumio Sakamoto. The researchers determined that increased carbon dioxide levels inside the bee ball also plays a role.
80beats is DISCOVER's news aggregator, weaving together the choicest tidbits from the best articles on the day's most compelling topics.
80beats is written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. This team darts through each day's science news faster than the ruby-throated hummingbird that beats its wings 80 times per second. Send ideas, tips, suggestions, and complaints to [azeeberg at discovermagazine dot com].
Queen bee larvae floating in royal jelly
It took Turkish bees to make Israel flow with milk and honey.
This spring, many beekeepers across America opened their hives and found ruin within. At a time when they should have been buzzing with activity, the hives were half-empty, with most adult bees having flown off to die. A new 
In leafcutter ants and honeybees, it’s survival of the fittest sperm. Biologist Boris Baer, for a 
Scientists have long wondered what exactly is killing 
Orchids have a clever way of attracting 
Japanese giant hornets can wreak havoc on a hive of Japanese honeybees, slicing off the heads of worker 
