Saving our bees( Most of the world's plant species re...)

Most of the world's plant species rely on animals to transfer their pollen to other plants. The undisputed queen of these animal pollinators is the bee, made up of about 30,000 species worldwide, whose daily flights aid in the reproduction of more than half of the world's flowering plants. In recent years, however, an unprecedented and unexplained decline in bee populations across the U.S. and Europe has placed the health of ecosystems and the sustainability of crops in peril.

In an oral session at the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, an interdisciplinary group of scientists will explore the problem of bee habitat loss at a broad scale to determine what can be done to preserve bees in their native habitats. The session, titled "The Landscape-Scale Ecology of Pollinators and Pollination," will include scientists in the fields of computer science, mathematics and ecology from institutions in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

The most recent and headline-capturing phenomenon, known as colony collapse disorder, is characterized by the disappearance of adult honeybees from beekeeper hives, leaving behind bee larvae with no caretakers. The bee decline is particularly unnerving for farmers because an estimated 80 percent of all food crops are pollinated by honeybees and their wild cousins. Stymied scientists have proposed a host of reasons for managed honeybee declines, including climate change, parasites, diseases, overexposure to pesticides and loss of suitable habitat; most researchers believe that a combination of these factors is responsible. In this oral session, scientists turn their attention to native, wild bees to determine whether they are undergoing or might undergo the same decline.

One of the session's organizers, Neal Williams of Bryn Mawr College, hopes that the session will result in the synthesis of ideas from many disciplines. "We want to know: Can we look at landscape models in a predictive way and use t
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