By Liz Kimbrough Six grassroots environmental activists will receive the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in a virtual ceremony this year. Dubbed the “Green Nobel Prize,” this award is given annually to environmental heroes from each of the world’s six inhabited continents. This year’s winners include an Indigenous Mayan beekeeper who led a coalition to ban […]
Could honeybees hold the key to treating an aggressive form of breast cancer? A new study out of Australia found that honeybee venom rapidly killed the cells for triple-negative breast cancer, a type of breast cancer that currently has few treatment options. “It provides another wonderful example of where compounds in nature can be used […]
By Rachael Bonoan and Phil Starks As many states and cities across the U.S. struggle to control COVID-19 transmission, one challenge is curbing the spread among people living in close quarters. Social distancing can be difficult in places such as nursing homes, apartments, college dormitories and migrant worker housing. As behavioral ecologists who have studied […]
Without bees, future generations may not be able to identify with adages like, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Crop yields for key crops like apples, cherries and blueberries are down across the U.S. because of a lack of bees in agricultural areas, a Rutgers University-led study published Wednesday in The Royal Society […]
The climate crisis has caused Japanese cherry blossoms to bloom in October and sped the arrival of spring in much of the U.S. But it turns out that humans aren’t the only animals who can trick plants into flowering early. Scientists have discovered that bumblebees can cause plants to flower as much as 30 days […]
By Ajit Niranjan Coronavirus lockdowns that keep farmers from fields and suppliers from markets are restricting another cornerstone of the agriculture industry: bees. Responsible for pollinating about a third of the plants we eat, bees are in short supply and their numbers are declining globally. In large, food-exporting countries like the U.S. and China, there […]
Scientists have “rediscovered” a rare blue bee that they feared was extinct. Until this spring, the “ultra-rare” blue calamintha bee (Osmia calaminthae) had only been observed in four locations in central Florida, and it hadn’t been seen at all since 2016. So when Florida Museum of Natural History research team Chase Kimmel and Jaret Daniels […]
By Akito Y Kawahara Editor’s note: According to recent press reports, two Asian giant hornets – a species not known to occur in North America – were found in northwest Washington state in late 2019, and a hornet colony was found and eliminated in British Columbia. Now scientists are trying to determine whether more of […]
Invasive “murder hornets” have been spotted in the U.S. for the first time, prompting concerns for the nation’s honeybees and the trajectory of a year that has already brought locust invasions and a global pandemic. Four sightings of the world’s largest hornets — officially called the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) — were reported and […]
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