Beekeeping

Bee extinction, it’s only the bee-ginning. Humans swat at them, spray them, and kill them. Has anyone ever thought of the importance of the honey bees people are trying to eliminate? Take a walk in nature on a sunny day and you’ll notice flowers blooming, plants growing, little critters moving around, and the buzzing of bees. Imagine if bees were taken out of the world . Honey bees have a much greater importance than most people realize, and taking them for granted could put a lot of resources…

Wasps make up an enormously diverse array of insects, with some 30,000 identified species. We are most familiar with those that are wrapped in bright warning colors—ones that buzz angrily about in groups and threaten us with painful stings. But most wasps are actually solitary, non-stinging varieties. And all do far more good for humans by controlling pest insect populations than harm. Wasps are distinguishable from bees by their pointed lower abdomens and the narrow "waist," called a petiole,…

Introduction Nepenthes gracilis, also goes by the name Slender Pitcher-Plant, is a widespread pitcher plant mostly found in Southeastern Asia. This plant distinguishes itself by the presence of a long tube-like, stretched pitcher which contains acidic fluid and enzyme to digest preys. N. gracilis also make use of its special trait, the lid on top of the pitcher to act as a trapping mechanism for preys looking for shield under its lid, and the nectar glands on the lids help in attracting preys…

1. In the article “ The great Poop Disaster” by Anna Starcheski, there are problems with bird poop and they also had solutions. One of the main problems in the article is, there are too many birds in one area. The article says, “ In New York City, for instance, the pigeon population was estimated to be as high as 7 million birds.” ( Starcheski,18) A solution to solve this problem would be to ban people from feeding birds. This would affect the population in a certain area because not as many…

Both the reading passage and the listening lecture are discussing methods to eliminate cane toads from their new environments in Australia. The writer asserts that there have been successful method in getting rid of the cane toads from the sugar cane fields of Australia. However, the lecturer disagrees with the writer's opinion by claiming that the three methods were not successful at all. First, the author claims that humans physically capturing and killing the cane toads has been effective.…

The Disappearance of Bees What would be the agricultural significance if our bees, the world’s most important pollinators, gradually disappeared over time? The answer: the agriculture industry will experience shortages in food, lose profits, and heavy pressure will be placed on farmers who won’t be able to meet demands for food. The world is seeing an increase of bees missing every year, and it’s all thanks to a mysterious phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder. In order to prevent the bees…

Bees pollinate about 80% of wild plants and 84% of human grown crops in terrestrial ecosystems (Brown, 2009). The ecosystem service of pollination has the economic value in the agricultural industry worth $1.7 billion (Brown, 2009). However, global honey bee populations are in decline (Potts, 2010). With the given projections for human population growth to reach around 9 billion by the year 2050, the importance of bees to human survival is vital (Brown, 2009). The US Fish and Wildlife Service…

Gro Amdam is a biologist stemming from Norway. She is known internationally for her research on the behavior and aging in honeybees. She uses honey bees in her lab to study the origins of social behavior. She investigates the honeybee social structure in an effort to understand how social behavior evolved from ancestral solitary forms of life. She has expanded this research to aging and epigenetics as she and her research team gained a better understanding of honey bee social behavior. It is…

What Caused Scientists to Think Honeybees Turned into ZomBees? Amy Barth’s purpose in writing “Rise of the ZomBees!” is to recount that scientists think bees are turned into ZomBees. John Hafernik, the biologist, spotted bees walking in circles on the sidewalk outside of his lab. Because of this strange behavior, Hafernik put them in a container. John Hafernik discovered that the bees have died in the container and with them were tiny brown pupae. Hafernik figured out that when a female zombie…

In this piece Darwin describes the differences between the hive bee and the humble bee. Bees have to shape their cells in ways that they hold the greatest amount of honey possible while using the least amount of wax. It seems quite amazing how these bees can make these shapes with all the angles and planes but what is amazing is that all it came from their instinct. The hive and the humble bee both structure their cells differently. At one end of the spectrum, the humble use their old their old…