Science and Research

Each month our Bee Informed Blog highlights current news, science, and research related to solitary bee conservation, food insecurity, and sustainability.

Each month our Bee Informed Blog highlights current news, science, and research related to solitary bee conservation, food insecurity, and sustainability.

Each month our Bee Informed Blog highlights current news, science, and research related to solitary bee conservation, food insecurity, and sustainability.

Each month our Bee Informed Blog will highlight current news, science, and research related to solitary bee conservation, food insecurity, and sustainability.

Each month our Bee Informed Blog will highlight current news, science, and research related to solitary bee conservation, food insecurity, and sustainability.

In a study we published earlier this year, we found that feral honey bees (managed honey bees gone wild) are preferentially removing food resources from the plant species that support the highest diversity and abundance of native pollinators.

Dave Hunter of Crown Bees filming at Oxbow Farm and Conservation Center in Washington State for a program by One Tree Planted about the important role bees play in supporting tree propagation.

Blue orchard mason bees are native bees that are active in the spring and are the perfect pollinators for blueberry fields. Emerging from their cocoons in the spring, they fly in cooler and wetter weather than honey bees.

Of the 20,000+ bee species on Earth, only about a dozen are used by farmers in commercial agriculture, and these crucial populations of managed bees have been declining at an alarming rate. Several factors, including increased use of pesticides, habitat fragmentation, emerging diseases, and reduced genetic diversity may be responsible for such bee losses. In response to this pollinator crisis, recent conservation efforts have led to stricter regulations on insecticide use. However, other agrochemicals such as herbicides and fungicides that do not directly target insects (such as bees) continue to be applied to in-bloom crops without much scrutiny. Curiously, past research shows that while certain fungicides may pose a lower risk for adult honey bees, they appear to be quite harmful to larval bees. Such findings were somewhat unexpected, and we at the Steffan lab wanted to find out why.

Dr. Jason Graham is the lead researcher developing conservation for the endangered Hawaiian yellow-faced bees in the Plant and Environmental Protection Sciences Department at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Seven species of Hawaii's yellow-faced bees were placed on the endangered species list in October 2016, these are the first species of bees to be protected and labeled as endangered.