“A New Species of the Genus Eurytoma Illiger Parasitic on Bees of the Genus Ceratina Latreille (Hymenoptera: Eurytomidae and Apoidea)” [by Robert E. Bugbee, Pan-Pacific Entomologist, vol. 42, no. 3, 1966, pp. 210-211.] is the study featured in “May We Recommend: Bugbee on Bugs that Bug Bees“, which is a featured article in the special […]
Ig Nobel Prize-winning scientists who discovered that dung beetles use the Milky Way to navigate have now learned (together with some colleagues) how certain bees probably manage to tamp down traffic congestion. Their study is: “Accelerated Landing in a Stingless Bee and Its Unexpected Benefits for Traffic Congestion,” Pierre Tichit, Isabel Alves-dos-Santos, Marie Dacke and […]
“Flower colours have evolved over 100 million years to address the colour vision of their bee pollinators.” With this in mind, investigators Professor Lars Chittka and Julian Walker of Queen Mary College, University of London, decided to investigate whether bees might also be attracted to paintings of flowers – for example (a copy of) Van Gogh’s […]
Ig Nobel Prize winners Marie Dacke and Emily Baird are now exploring how how bees collide or don’t is different from how fish collide or don’t. They and their colleagues have just published a study of the matter. The 2013 Ig Nobel Prize jointly in the fields of biology and astronomy was awarded to Marie Dacke, Emily […]
For the first time, a peer-reviewed comprehensive discography of US-based apical musical recordings has been assembled. (Think : bees, hives, honey, buzzing, stingers, &etc). Professor William Lewis Schurk (Sound Recordings Archivist of the Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, US) and colleague professor B. Lee Cooper, (presently at the […]
Alex Wild writes in his Compound Eye blog: Why are media insects misidentified? That’s not a bee…. How does a fly end up advertising a book whose target audience, not to mention the mortified authors, will instantly recognize as a mistake? Publishers, photo editors, and stock agencies—those entities that purchase from image creators—trust photographers to correctly […]
Investigator Daniel Heller [pictured here] alerts us to something peculiar that pertains to a soon-to-be-published study he co-authored. The study is “Peptide secondary structure modulates single-walled carbon nanotube fluorescence as a chaperone sensor for nitroaromatics“, PNAS 2011 : 1005512108v1-6. Heller writes: “[Someone] seems to have translated an online post about our article into a foreign language and […]
The Deccan Chronicle reports about the latest experiment by 2002 Ig Nobel mathematics prize winner K.P. Sreekumar: Forest dept to use bees to stop jumbos Honeybees may look humble but can drive away a marauding pack of wild elephants. This is no Aesop fable but a new strategy being mooted by the desperate forest department […]
Professor Norman E Gary is the rare academic who plays clarinet while he is covered with live bees, and often in public. An emeritus professor of apiculture at the University of California (Davis), Gary also plays Dixieland music in a human ensemble called the Beez Kneez Jazz Band. He generally goes solo for the bee-encrusted […]
This week’s That’s One Way of Looking At It conclusion appears in a press release from the University of Haifa. (Thanks to investigator Scott Langill for bringing this to our attention). It says: Bees prefer nectar with small amounts of nicotine and caffeine over nectar that does not comprise these substances at all, a study […]