Flying bees carry a positive electric charge that pulls pollen through the air onto their bodies before they even touch a flower. Here's the real physics behind it, and how bees may use it to forage smarter.
Groups of worker bees rock rhythmically against the hive front in a behavior called washboarding — and after more than a century of study, scientists still can't say for certain why they do it.
DriftWatch and BeeCheck let beekeepers and pesticide applicators see each other's locations on a shared map before a pesticide application happens. Here's how the voluntary registry actually works.
Animal pollination adds hundreds of billions of dollars to global food production every year. Here's the real IPBES figure, where it comes from, and what it does and doesn't tell us about pollinator decline.
The colorful European bee-eater specializes in catching bees on the wing, and in some regions honeybees make up nearly half its diet. Here's what the research actually shows about the impact on apiaries.
Before modern hives, Appalachian beekeepers housed colonies in hollowed-out black gum tree trunks. Here's how bee gums were built, populated, and harvested — and why the practice eventually faded.
The bee orchid's flower is shaped, colored, and scented to impersonate a female bee closely enough to fool males into trying to mate with it. Here's how the deception actually works, and why it doesn't always have to.
Pollination syndromes pair flower color, shape and scent with bees, hummingbirds, moths, bats and flies. Here is the trait table, plus how often the pattern really predicts the pollinator.
A parasitic fly called Apocephalus borealis lays eggs inside honey bees, driving infected bees to leave the hive at night and die near lights. Here's what's actually known about the phenomenon nicknamed "zombie bees."
A virulent sacbrood virus strain has caused over 90% mortality in Korea's native Apis cerana since 2008, reshaping the country's beekeeping industry.
Brighton & Hove's planning policy has required bee bricks in new buildings since 2020, giving Britain's 250 solitary bee species nesting habitat modern construction removed.
Robotic pollination already works commercially for greenhouse tomatoes, but it's nowhere near replacing what bees do across open-field crops at scale.
The Mawalis of the Sundarbans harvest wild honey from giant honey bee combs in mangrove forest shared with Bengal tigers — a documented, genuinely dangerous tradition.
Vanilla orchids co-evolved with a specific Melipona stingless bee native to Mexico, which is why nearly every vanilla pod grown elsewhere is pollinated entirely by hand.
Project Apis m., founded in 2006 by beekeepers and almond growers, has invested over $13 million in practical bee research, including its Seeds for Bees forage program.
Apis andreniformis, the black dwarf honey bee, is one of the two smallest honey bee species alive, nesting as a single exposed comb rather than in a cavity.
Most bumblebee nest boxes sold for gardens go unused — published studies found occupancy rates as low as 0-1.5% — but design and placement can meaningfully improve the odds.
Mountain beekeeping works, but a shorter season, thinner air, and colder nights mean hive placement, winter feeding, and local genetics matter more than at lower elevations.
A single afternoon in 1957, when a visiting beekeeper removed queen excluders he mistook for a mistake, is the real origin of every Africanized honey bee across two continents.
The 120-plus-year history of the Smithsonian's bee and insect specimen collection, from an 1898 acquisition to its 2020 shift to full public open access.
How a Belgian playwright's 1901 philosophical bestseller about the beehive shaped public fascination with bees, years before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
How a 17th-century English vicar's patient hive observations produced the first English-language beekeeping book — and correctly named the hive's ruler a queen decades before anyone could prove it.
What illustrated medieval bestiaries actually said about bees — surprisingly accurate on colony life, and centuries wrong about the queen and spontaneous generation.
What a 46-park National Park Service bee survey actually found, and a practical guide to spotting wild native bees — a very different activity from honey-bee beekeeping.
How to run a honey tasting flight at home like a wine tasting — light-to-dark order, real varietal sampler sets worth buying, and how to take notes worth keeping.