stingless

Mayan stingless bee keeping: Going, going, gone?

Long before Europeans brought honey bees (Apis mellifera) to the Americas, Mayan bee keepers harvested honey from the log nests of stingless bees native to tropical forests. Now, colleagues from the Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Quintana Roo, Mexico and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (...

Shade coffee benefits more than birds

... Jha, a graduate student whose main interest is insects, initially wanted to find out whether shade coffee farms nurture native pollinators such as stingless bees. When she began her fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, she focused on a particular tree, Miconia affinis , which is pollinated by an unusual method...

Bee species outnumber mammals and birds combined

...hese bees do not make honey or live in hives but are essential pollinators of crops and native plants. Honey is made by nearly 500 species of tropical stingless bees in addition to the well-known honey bee Apis mellifera. Honey bees are the most economically important pollinators and are currently in the news ...

AMNH scientists grace Science & Nature covers

...s because of their simple organization and lack of a nervous system, were found in this study to be more derived. Comb jellies, a group which includes stingless sea gooseberries, seem to have primitive shared characteristics. These results point us in a direction for further research, explains Wheeler. These r...

UCR-led research team uses tiny wasp to wipe out major agricultural pest in Tahiti

...involves introducing Gonatocerus ashmeadi , a microscopic parasitic wasp, into an ecosystem under siege from the glassy-winged sharpshooter. The tiny stingless wasp attacks glassy-winged sharpshooter eggs by drilling a tiny hole in the egg through which the parasite lays its own egg. The wasp larva that hatc...

First orchid fossil puts showy blooms at some 80 million years old

...blic in 2000, came to the attention of Ram rez and his colleagues at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology in 2005. While this particular species of stingless bee, Proplebeia dominicana, is now extinct, the scientists' analysis of the shape and configuration of its cargo of pollen places it firmly within one...

Primates harvest bee nests in Ugandan reserve

...study of native African honeybees and honey-making stingless bees in the same habitat, humans and chimpanzees a...or food, located 228 bee nests (both honeybees and stingless bees) for the study. Roubik identified the bees an...o other sites in the tropics, whereas honey-making stingless bee nests were relatively scarce. Nest abundance ...