"There’s [a] downside of resuming mowing after May. #Bees are... clever creatures that can learn where flowers are in their environment (your garden). This...is called “flower constancy”, & is critical to how #honeybees & bumblebees survive. When the wild patches are cut...all the energy & effort the bees have put in to learning where to find these #flowers is wasted."
@stux@MarcoWam Weer klokken en klepels enzo. eind jaren veertig waren er bijna 50.000 imkers in Nederland en leefden er ook nog vele wilde kolonies in schoorstenen en holle bomen. Na een dieptepunt een jaar of 15 terug waren er nog 5.000 imkers en door varoa-mijt nog nauwelijks wilde volken over. Ook hier geldt weer, als de natuur op orde was was er überhaupt geen probleem met wilde bijen. Dat kun je de honingbijen niet aanrekenen.
The honeybee brain hosts over 600,000 neurons, at a density higher than that of mammalian brains:
"Our estimate of total brain cell number for the European honeybee (Apis mellifera;
≈ 6.13 × 10^5, s = 1.28 × 10^5; ...) was lower than the existing estimate from brain sections ≈ 8.5 × 10^5"
"the highest neuron densities have been found in the smallest respective species examined (smoky shrews in mammals; 2.08 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [14] and goldcrests in birds; 4.9 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [16]). The Hymenoptera in our sample have on average higher cell densities than vertebrates (5.94 × 10^5 cells mg^−1; n = 30 species)."
Ants, on the other hand ...
"ants stand out from bees and wasps as having particularly small brains by measures of mass and cell number."
A huge factor are eyes. Bees and wasps have large eyes and this requires more nervous system to support them.
But also, they have included ants of various sizes, tiny ants, big ants... but not tiny wasps? The ones who have the smallest functional brains of all.
On fairy wasps, they do include them. This is what they write:
"In the small Hymenoptera, neuron size may be a limiting factor for brain miniaturization, as shown for the smallest insects (the parasitoid wasp Megaphragma [42]), whose larval brains comprise less than 5000 cells, the cell bodies of which are lost during pupation. The brain of the smallest species in our sample (the parasitoid wasps Leptopilina; figure 1) comprised around 30 000 cells (electronic supplementary material, table S1). Similar neuron numbers (2.2 × 105–3.7 × 105 neurons; [43]) have been estimated for fairyflies (Hymenoptera: Mymaridae), which are smaller than the smallest of our samples, suggesting that our cell number estimates may be conservative."
On ants: ants have large antennae and use them for all sorts of tasks, including sensing wind, scent, and mechanoreceptively as if they were hands but also as drums for assessing through vibration the content and properties of what they are touching. Parasitoid wasps ("flying ants", sort of) use their antennae to drum surfaces, a form of active echolocation of caterpillars and larvae inside plant stems or wood. All of these activities need a lot of brain power to process them.
Granted, eyes as 2D surfaces require lots of repeated neurons for contrast and color, and neurons that integrate across them just to process movement in the visual scene. I'd like to see a comparison with the size of antennal lobes and AMMC (antennal mechanosensory and motor center) regions of wasps and ants.
Not sure who needs to hear this... but... honey bees throughout the world are an invasive species. They are only native to Europe. Stop trying to save invasive species!
yeah, but my question was why the term "honey bees" wouldn't apply to these other animals that are also bees that make honey. it sounds inconsistent and discriminatory to me. though I suppose the affected bees wouldn't care so much one way or the other ;-)
now, Brazilian native stingless bees are far more common visitors to my home than the exotic honey bees. they're far more welcome, too ;-)
From Thomas Seeley's "Honeybee democracy" https://archive.org/details/honeybeedemocrac0000seel (can be borrowed for free online at the @scholar ) with stories about his lab and early PhD work studying how bee scouts communicate and a swarm decides to move to a new home, including summaries from earlier, pioneering work by Martin Lindauer, to now Anna Hadjitofi and Barbara Webb https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982224002203 figuring out how a worker bee reads out the waggle dance from scouts and foragers. Quite the journey.
Every year, the bloom of thousands of almond trees in California spurs one of the world’s largest, albeit artificial, migrations of animals; as billions of #honeybees are loaded onto trucks and sent to deliver lucrative pollination fees for their human keepers.
This insect odyssey ensures paydays for often struggling beekeepers, the production of most of the world’s almonds, and increasingly, an opportunity for enterprising thieves.
Standing in the way of the bee rustlers — often alone — is #Rowdy#Freeman, a deputy at the Butte County Sheriff’s Office in California’s Central Valley.
Freeman is a steely sort of bee detective. Angular, with a shaved head and fond of wearing wrap-around sunglasses, the taciturn deputy is a beekeeper himself and is aghast at how hive thefts have become so ubiquitous.
Last year, according to Freeman calculations, a record of more than 🔸2,300 honeybee hives were stolen in the Central Valley🔸.
This year’s thefts could easily surpass that number, with Freeman recording nearly 2,000 hives stolen already.
Despite the growing scale of this crime, Freeman is typically the only law enforcement officer working with beekeepers to track the stolen hives and their thieves.
“I’m trying to get more help for this because it’s become a major problem, it’s getting out of control,” Freeman said.
While California has state branches devoted to stamping out the theft of #horses or #cattle, no such task force exists for bees, he notes with no small amount of envy and frustration.
The federal government is also uninterested in the issue, despite what Freeman describes as clear-cut evidence that stolen hives have been transported over state lines @thebeeguy @ai6yr @firephoto
🐝🐝🐝 "...today we bring you a story not of divisive politics but of a remarkable recovery. The bees are coming back. And folks, this is a very big deal."
--Dan Rather
"New bee farmers are a big reason bees are making a comeback. According to the USDA, more than 1 million honeybee colonies have been added in the United States in five years. Bees, which are classified as livestock, are the fastest-growing herd by double digits....
"...The way you support both honeybees and beekeepers — and the way you save native pollinators — is to go out there and create beautiful flower-rich habitat on your farm or your garden."
🐝❤️