bees (Page 12)

We’ve learned that bees may communicate through a quantum dance. But they also know something we don’t: the color of a flower indicates how warm the nectar inside it is. That doesn’t mean much to us, but it’s important to know if you’re a bee, because eating their food warm can mean the difference between life and death.

In LiveScience.com, Sara Goudarzi quotes Lars Chittka, writing in the journal Nature, as saying that, from a bee’s point of view, “if you need to warm up, you can produce your own heat, at the expense of some of your energy reserves?or you can consume a warm drink, and save on investing your own energy.”
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For 70 years, scientists have known that honeybees tell the other bees in their hive where the good nectar is by doing an elaborate bee dance. The dance of the honeybee is one of the most intricate communications in nature. But how can a tiny animal with only a few million neurons possibly possess all the information needed to carry it out? The answer: it may be a quantum dance.
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Pesticide levels that were previously thought to be safe for bees may actually be harmful to them. Adult bumble bees exposed to the pesticide spinosad have an impaired ability to forage for food. Spinosad is a natural pesticide derived from the bacteria Actinomycetes. It’s used in over 30 countries, including North America, Canada and the UK, to combat common crop pests such as caterpillars and thrips. Bees are important pollinators of crops. In developed countries, about a third of human food relies on their pollination. Less dramatic effects on honey bees could be going unnoticed, and other species could also be affected.
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