Plants for Year-round Bee Forage, from the University of Georgia Honeybee Program As you're starting to think about Spring planting, think about planting more plants for our pollinators. This is an incomplete list of both wild and commercially available plants that are important sources of pollen and nectar for pollinators in the South. It is important for bees, especially bumble bees, to have an unbroken succession of bloom all summer to build up their local populations.

How do bee larvae develop into workers (sterile females)? It's all about what they're fed. In part, it is because of their diet of pollen, digestive juices (that contain beneficial bacteria, yeasts and fungi) along with honey, that is mixed together to ferment into beebread. Beebread is rich in protein and in plant regulatory molecules called microRNAs, which delay development and keep their ovaries inactive. Researchers have long known that diet plays a key role in the comp

In field experiments in the Rockies, scientists discovered the cascade effect on an ecosystem that lost just one pollinator species. “We see an ecological cascade of effects across the whole pollinator community, fundamentally changing the structure of plant-pollinator interaction networks,” says Berry Brosi, a biologist at Emory University and author of the study published in Biology Letters. “We can see this shift in who visits which plant even in pollinators that are no

A colony of honey bees is an amazing organism when it is healthy; it is a super-organism in many senses of the word. -The individual bees that make up a honeybee colony deliver to the super-organism what it needs. -Honeybees with access to better and more complete nutrition exhibit improved immune system function and behavioral defenses for fighting off effects of pathogens and pesticides. -Bee colonies are chronically exposed to parasitic mites, viruses, diseases, miticide