Social bees – and I don’t mean only honey bees by this – are more visible than solitary species. When there’s a bumblebee colony nearby or an apiary, you will automatically see more bumblebees of this species or honey bees flying around. It’s a numbers game. However, I always insist that the bee colonies are…
Bumblebee ranges are a bit different from other bees. As a rule of thumb, bees are most diverse in regions with Mediterranean climate. Bumblebees, on the other hand, like it cooler. I like to call them the polar bears between the bees. This is funny, because, as I learned today, in China apparently they’re called…
The impact of climate change on pollinators is complex. In the examples I gave last week, we saw how a divergence between the flowering period of a plant and the activity period of a bee species can affect the latter. Such phenological mismatches happen when plants and pollinators react differently to rising temperatures. Phenology, if…
Many, many years ago, I was coordinating a federal honey bee selection project in Germany. There was a problem, though: The season doesn’t start at the same time in the whole country. To make the data comparable, we asked the beekeepers to start with their observations when the goat willow started to bloom. This was…
Over my winter break, I tried to recap this crazy year that 2020 has been. The pandemic was the dominant influence for everybody. I had some diffuse thoughts in my head, about parallels in different fields of research. Watching this brilliant video by Medlife Crisis, everything kind of fell into place. Dr Rohin Francis is…
How was your 2020? Most people will say that it was difficult, fearsome, or even disastrous. And it was. Most of my business plans for this year were void when it became clear that SARS-CoV-2 will cause a pandemic. In the first moment, I was shocked. BeeSafe lives the European idea – I travel a…
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