FAO declared 2021 the International Year of Fruit and Vegetables. They want to attract attention to the importance of fruit and veggies for healthy nutrition. In the end, it’s also about ending poverty, as these food crops give farmers income and foster more diverse agriculture. Another objective is to reduce waste and losses in food…
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…
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