Beewolves use a gas to preserve food

Scientists from the Universities of Regensburg and Mainz and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology discovered that the eggs of the European beewolf produce nitric oxide. The gas prevents the larvae's food from getting ...

Substance that guides ant trail is produced by symbiotic bacteria

Researchers working on the Ribeirão Preto campus of the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil have discovered that a bacterium found in the microbiota associated with leafcutter ant species Atta sexdens rubropilosa produces ...

Nesting aids make agricultural fields attractive for bees

Wild bees are important pollinators of many crop plants – sometimes they are even more efficient than honeybees. Their numbers can be increased sustainably using simple means as a recent study has found.

Climate change threatens domestic bee species

There are around 550 different bee species in Germany. Most of them are solitary bees. They don't live in large beehives like the honeybee, but each female bee often builds multiple nests and feeds her offspring alone. Solitary ...

'Bone-house wasp' uses dead ants to protect their nest

A new species of spider wasp, the 'Bone-house Wasp,' may use chemical cues from dead ants as a nest protection strategy, according to a recent study published July 2, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Michael Staab ...

Honey bees fight back against Varroa

The parasitic mite Varroa destructor is a major contributor to the recent mysterious death of honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology finds that specific ...

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