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A quarter of all known bees "haven't been seen" since 1990 -- and this is bad news

Bees are in trouble, and some are becoming harder and harder to find.

Climate change is decoupling bee lifecycles from that of flowers

It's a bad strategy to not be where your food is -- or when.

Primitive bee trapped in 100-million-year-old amber is one of the earliest pollinators

The fossils could tell us more about the changes ancient wasps went through as they evolved into bees.

Beautifully preserved 99-million-year-old beetle was early pollinator

Amber is an amazing time capsule.

NASA Explores the Use of Robotic Bees on Mars

Marsbees could cover a lot more ground on the Red Planet than sluggish rovers.

Restoring native plants boosts pollination

Removing invasive plants and restoring native ones does a great deal to help pollination, a new study finds.

Scientists find a new way through which neonicotinoids are killing off bees

Bee populations are going down dramatically, and our insecticides are largely at blame.

These heavy metal bees head-bang flowers 350 time/second to release pollen

Blue-banded bees employ a head on approach to pollination, a group of researchers at Adelaide University showed. While other bees use their mandibles and wings to shake the pollen, this Australian native insect is all "no-hands" and bangs its head against the flowers 350 times per second -- considerably faster than any bee noticed so far.

Bumblebees in Europe and North America bumble away from the equator as habitats shrink due to climate change

In the most comprehensive study ever conducted of the impacts of climate change on critical pollinators, scientists have discovered that global warming is rapidly shrinking the area where these bees are found in both North America and Europe.

Bee numbers dropping at incredible rates

Something is killing off the bees; it's likely us, and we'll all have to pay the price. In fact, in many areas of the world, we already are.

Fossil of Earliest Bird Pollinator Found

Researchers have discovered the earliest evidence of a bird pollinator visiting flowers, presumably to feed on the nectar – if true, this means that bird pollinator/plants interactions were already taking place 47 million years ago. When you think about pollinators, you mostly think about bees or butterflies – but birds are significant pollinators too. Birds, particularly […]

Flowers use electrical signals to summon bees

Pollination is the game, “summon bees” is the spell, and electricity is the mana – that’s how I’d try to explain it to a gamer. A little more on the serious side, flowers advertise presence of nectar to bees using electrical signals, basically indicating if they’ve been visited by another bee or not. Usually, plants […]

Rainforest plant evolved beacon for pollinating bats

A lot of attenton has been given to plants that visually attract pollinating bees, through bright colours and spectacular designs, but bats play a very important role for pollinating as well, and there is much we have yet to understand about how they can be attracted by plants. Researchers have now discovered that a species […]