If I wasnt doing cancer....

I would have done bees among the many insects I was curious about:

From Scientific American:





1) WHO TO TAKE THE PLACE OF DECLINING HONEYBEES POPULATION?

Honeybees have been dying in record numbers in the U.S. for at least the past two years. Experts attribute the mass deaths to a catchall condition known as colony collapse disorder (CCD), although both a cure and the culprit remain elusive. Despite as much as a 35 percent loss of bees per year, we remain almost entirely dependent on what until recently was a self-renewing annual population of billions of honeybees to pollinate over 130 kinds of fruit and nut crops.

"We can't rely on the honeybee forever," says Blair Sampson, an entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). That's a problem, given that entomologists have yet to come up with a viable alternative. But researchers report that another bee known as the blue orchard, or Osmia lignaria, holds out promise of filling in the void.

The blue orchard bee, also known as the orchard mason bee, is one of 3,000 bee species native to the U.S. and is currently the subject of intensive study by the USDA's Pollinating Insect Biology, Management and Systematics Research Unit at Utah State University in Logan.

James Cane, an entomologist at the Logan bee lab, has been working for 10 years to increase the availability of these bees and he says there are now a million blue orchards pollinating crops in California.

The reason these bees are considered the best potential honeybee stand-ins, Cane says, is that unlike some specialist native species, blue orchard bees, like honeybees, can pollinate a variety of crops—including almonds, peaches, plums, cherries, apples and others.

In just about every other respect, however, these bees are totally unlike their European brethren. For one, they tend to live alone. In the wild, rather than hives, they inhabit boreholes drilled by beetles into the trunks and branches of dead trees. When cultivated, they will happily occupy holes drilled into lumber or even Styrofoam blocks.

The blue orchard bees also do not produce honey, rarely sting and, owing to their solitary nature, do not swarm. They are incredibly efficient pollinators of many tree fruit crops—on a typical acre, 2,000 blue orchard bees can do the work of more than 100,000 honeybees. Their biggest drawback is that beekeepers can only increase their populations by a factor of three to eight each year. (Honey bees can grow from a small colony consisting of a queen and a few dozen workers to a population of 20,000 foragers in a few months.)

"We're still in the development stage of applying all the research that has been done" by USDA's Agricultural Research Service, says David Moreland, CEO of AgPollen, the world’s leading producer of blue orchard bees for the California almond industry.

Of the nearly 700,000 acres (285,000 hectares) of almonds cultivated in California this growing season, as many as 300 acres (120 hectares) were pollinated by blue orchards, according to Moreland. Growers' inspiration for trying the new pollinator is simple economics—last season they were paying up to $300 to rent a single hive of honeybees, 10 times what they paid a decade ago. This trend has made blue orchard bees cost-competitive with honeybees, but only barely.

"It's not clear we can [raise blue orchard bees on a commercial scale] in a cost-effective way," says Karen Strickler, an entomologist at the University of Idaho from 1993-2000 who has worked with solitary bees and who currently distributes them to beekeepers and hobbyists through the bee dealership PollinatorParadise.com, located in New Mexico.

Another solitary bee, known as the leaf-cutter, is the success story on which scientists and beekeepers hope to model the trajectory of the blue orchard bee.

"Ninety percent of all alfalfa seed in the U.S. is grown using the alfalfa leaf-cutter bee for pollination," Moreland says. "That's huge—that's an industry that over the past 25 years went from zero to the preferred bee. So there's a model there that says: 'This has happened before, it can happen again.'"

Cane, described by his peers as one of the world experts on orchard bees, cautions that these bees currently can only supplement—and not supplant—honeybees.

"The sheer number of bees you would need—at least 500 per acre (0.4 hectare)—it will never replace honeybees," says Cane. "That's an outrageous number if you think about it."

AgPollen's Moreland is more optimistic. "If we got to the point that we could not maintain populations [of honeybees]," he says, "this is one way to ensure that the largest dollar specialty crop in California for export—the almond—doesn't lose its pollinator."




2) STINGLESS BEES MUMMIFIED THE NASTY TRESPASSERS

Bees are under attack around the world. One of their nastiest foes: small hive beetles (Aethina tumida). Native to sub-Saharan Africa, these invaders can completely destroy the hives of common honeybees, which they have been pushing around throughout the U.S. and Australia.

"When [small hive beetles] invade a colony, their larval feeding and the spoilage that ensues converts the comb and honey into this lavalike substance. They make an incredible mess out of the comb and [bee] brood and everything else," says James Cane, an entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Pollinating Insect Biology, Management and Systematics Research Unit at Utah State University in Logan.

For a time, scientists were concerned that the parasite might also threaten Australia's native stingless bees (Trigona carbonaria), but it turns out these critters are made of tougher stuff than their European honeybee cousins.

Researchers recently discovered that although they lack stingers, these bees are pros at immobilizing interlopers. Mark Greco and Peter Neumann, entomologists at the Swiss Bee Research Center in Bern, discovered that as soon as the beetles enter a hive, worker bees in the colony surround them and force them to immediately pull their legs under their carapaces, adopting what is known as the "turtle" protective posture. This stance employs the beetles' hard shells to shield them from attack, but it also prevents them from moving. Worker bees take advantage of this, gluing the immobile beetles to the walls of the hive with resin collected from plants; they then "mummify" their captives with a substance called batumen, a mix of plant resins, wax and mud.

View photos of Mummifying Bees

Greco says he and Neumann call the process mummification because "the beetles remain incapable of moving, and therefore die."

Honeybees exhibit a similar behavior, called social isolation, but it is significantly less effective against the small hive beetle. To isolate the invaders, honeybees construct small chambers around the beetles, but do not seal them off completely. Instead worker bees guard the entrances of these chambers, which often allows the beetles enough time to mate and produce their hive-trashing larvae. In contrast, the stingless bees' mummification process takes a total of 10 minutes from start to finish, at which point the beetle is completely immobilized and starves to death without any further attention from the members of the hive.

The researchers discovered this rapid mummification behavior by taking high-resolution digital x-rays of entire hives with medical computed tomography (CT) scanners, a new twist on an old procedure known as radioentomology.

"It is really kind of a novel approach," says Jeff Pettis, research leader at the USDA's Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md. "You can get at some biological questions that you can't get at otherwise."

Greco and Neumann report in Nature Precedings that they were able to witness the entire battle between the bees and beetles play out in high-resolution 3-D by using a "micro CT" scanner that took snapshots of a stingless bee hive every five minutes for an hour and a half.

Even though the study was published on a prepress service, which means it has yet to be peer-reviewed, other experts in the field praised the authors' methodology and findings.

"It's a really clever way to keep track of what's in the colony without having to take apart the colony," says Christina Grozinger, an associate professor of entomology at Pennsylvania Sate University in University Park.

Ultimately, this research may help Australian growers reduce their dependence on the relatively vulnerable European honeybee. It turns out that stingless bees are better than honeybees at pollinating peppers, a commercially important crop in Australia.

"We place manufactured beehives containing colonies of these bees in the greenhouses," Greco says, "and the bees pollinate the vegetables without stinging the workers."

3) BEE FLIGHT SOLVED

In the 1930s French scientists determined that bees could not fly. They knew, of course, that the insects could and did. But according to their calculations, this feat was aerodynamically impossible. They based that conclusion on the fact that wings as small as a bee's could not possibly produce enough lift to allow the bee to get airborne. The problem was, they presumed that the bee's wings were stable, like an airplane's, when in fact honeybees flap and rotate their wings 240 times a second. This flapping, along with the supple nature of the wings themselves, allows a bee--or any flying insect, for that matter--to create a vortex that lifts it into the air. But the specific aerodynamic mechanics of that process as it pertains to the honeybee, with its stubby wings, has remained a mystery until now.

New research from Michael Dickinson of the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues finally explains how Apis mellifera flies. Unlike other flying insects, honeybees use short wing strokes of less than 90 degrees and a high number of flaps every second to stay aloft. The researchers found that when challenged to fly in difficult conditions, such as a mixture of oxygen and helium that mimicked air density at more than five miles up in the atmosphere, the bees resorted to wider strokes but maintained the same high flapping frequency.

This means that honeybees are using a wing stroke pattern that is less efficient than the broader strokes and slower flapping of fruit flies and other insects, despite their constant foraging for food and other necessities. But it also means that a bee can generate more lift when it needs to--when it must carry a heavy load, for example. The researchers speculate that this odd set of strokes may have arisen from precisely this need, as the social creatures sometimes must fly while burdened with nectar or larvae. A report detailing the new findings is being published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.