Allowing use of two neonicotinoids to combat crop-ruining disease will kill bees and reduce harvests, union says

Beekeepers and environmentalists in France have reacted furiously after parliament approved a bill reauthorising two banned pesticides scientists say can poison bees.

“There are no words to describe the frustration,” said Carolyn Bouguet, a beekeeper in Essonne, greater Paris. “Bee populations have already been badly compromised by climate change, new parasites and loss of habitat. And now this.”

Insects in study fared better in cold when given a probiotic and prebiotic mix alongside their usual sugar diet

Food supplements for honeybees could help the insects better withstand temperature stresses linked to a changing climate, early research suggests.

Scientists found that worker bees fed a mixture of probiotics and inulin, a plant-derived prebiotic, survived prolonged cold exposure better than bees given an ordinary sugar diet.

Animals may inhabit the same world as us, but new research shows how their perceptions of what is around them differs

Imagine standing in your garden. A bumblebee whizzes overhead too quickly to follow, a sparrow darts from the fence to the trees, and a snail lugs itself across the garden stones. Assume for a moment that each of these animals has a stream of experience – that the world for them unfolds over time. How does the world appear from their perspective? In short, do they experience time in a similar way to us?

Scientific studies have already shown that humans, bees, sparrows and snails all differ in sensitivity to wavelengths of light and frequencies of sound – that is, we see and hear differently. But in a recent review, our research group asked whether time, that stream of experience, unfolds in the same way for us as it does for the bee, the sparrow, or the snail?

Bees respond to tasty treats or plain water based on context, a study that may provide support for establishing insect sentience shows

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When bumblebees taste something good, they reach out their glossa – or insect tongue – for a while afterwards, almost as if they are licking their lips. And when they don’t like something, the insects will shake their heads and wipe their mouths.

Scientists who captured the miniature facial expressions on slow-motion video say the behaviour is consistent with “liking” and “disliking” responses observed in mammals. Their results have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Are we in the opening scenes of a disaster movie? There’s something going on with insects

It’s the start of the G7, guaranteeing us a week of either serious commentary or hot mic moments that may, in their way, prove more revealing than all the thousands of words of analysis. Previous summits have delivered a steady flow of off-the-cuff remarks from world leaders, including President Obama, at the G20 in 2011, grousing to the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, about Benjamin Netanyahu (“You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day”), and Jacques Chirac, who, at a European summit in the early 2000s, said of the UK: “You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine. It is the country with the worst food after Finland.” Rude!

Crops and flowers rely on them for survival, but wild bees are declining – and crucial nutrients will go missing from our diets as a result

There are few ways in and out of Nepal’s Jumla district. The Karnali highway, considered one of the world’s most dangerous roads, provides the only land link, splicing through the Himalayas to connect Jumla’s terraced valleys to the rest of the country. As such, the 120,000 people that live there are almost entirely self-sufficient, with most of them eating and selling what they grow.

It’s a tenuous existence, plagued by food insecurity and malnutrition. In recent years, local beekeepers have bemoaned languishing hives and dwindling honey production, observing that roughly half of their bees seem to have vanished over the past decade. These concerns, however, ignore an even more insidious impact.

Insects join list of species capable of solving simple ‘box-and-banana’ problem that demonstrates basic intelligence

Bumblebees can use tools to solve a problem, according to experiments that demonstrate their remarkably advanced cognitive abilities.

The bees were given an adapted version of an experiment that, 100 years ago, first demonstrated chimpanzees could work out how to retrieve an out-of-reach banana by stacking boxes. Since then, various other primates, elephants and crows have joined an elite cohort of species known to be capable of this level of insight and spontaneous problem solving.

‘Floral buzzing’, the vibrations bees use to shake pollen loose from flowers, takes more energy than previously thought

Bees use as much energy collecting pollen through “floral buzzing” as they do taking off in flight, a study shows.

Scientists have found the vibrations bumblebees use to shake pollen loose from flowers are among the most exhausting behaviours they perform, forcing bees to “carefully choose” which flowers are worth visiting.

Massachusetts woman set swarms of insects on sheriff’s deputies attempting to evict elderly man with cancer

A beekeeper has been jailed for six months after she set swarms of her insects on sheriff’s deputies attempting to carry out an eviction at a friend’s house.

Rebecca Woods insisted she only released her truckload of hives to allow the bees to enjoy the “lovely, flowering landscape” near the home of an elderly friend and cancer patient.

My daughter complained of monsters in her closet – at night she could hear a hum in the wall

It started in September 2023, when my daughter Saylor was three years old. She began having trouble sleeping, and said there were monsters in her closet. She could hear a hum in the wall. We thought it was because she loved the movie Monsters, Inc, given it’s about monsters who visit children’s bedrooms at night. We calmed her down by giving her a bottle of water, which we called monster spray.

But soon she was scared again. By February, she was back in our room. Later that month, I saw a giant cluster of bees buzzing by the attic laundry vent outside the house. I was pregnant with our third child, exhausted, and thought I was hallucinating.

Langstone, Hampshire: Solitary bees, albeit hundreds of them, are hovering low to the ground, hoping to mate before nightfall

One of the 68 UK-recorded species of mining bee in the genus Andrena, the ashy mining bee (Andrena cineraria) is classified as solitary. Yet on the narrow, balding strip of turf in front of my neighbours’ garage, they appear anything but.

The ground shimmers with movement, as several hundred bees hover low in the spring sunshine. While each female maintains her own burrow – a neat, pencil-eraser-sized hole excavated in the bare, sun-warmed soil – they’ve gathered here in a dense aggregation, turning this modest patch into a bustling settlement.

Like so many flying insects, these essential pollinators are suffering because of habitat loss and the overuse of chemicals. Here’s how to give them a healthier, happier home

We know about honeybees and bumblebees, but most of the UK’s bees are neither: they’re solitary bees, loners who come in a dizzying range of sizes, colours and varieties – more than 240 species. Have you heard, for instance, of the hairy-footed flower bee? “They’re one of the first bees to emerge each year,” says Laura Larkin, the chief conservation officer at Buglife. “The males have got fantastic little fluffy bits on their feet.”

How about leaf-cutter bees, which chomp “a perfectly circular hole” out of leaves to build their nests? Or bright-orange tawny mining bees, wool-carder bees, ivy bees? “There are so many of them and I’m still learning,” says Kate Bradbury, a wildlife gardener, writer, bee lover and the author of One Garden Against the World. “They’re just great – there’s a solitary bee for every occasion.”

For decades, there was no record of Andrena rehni exisiting in the US. In 2018 it was found in Maryland and five years later I found it in New York State

I’ve loved insects ever since I was a kid and spent summers looking for them. My mum would always tell me that from the age of one – even before I could walk – I would happily sit outside, watching ants and trying to follow them back to their colony.

As an adult, I take people out to meadows with nets to catch insects and take a close look at them. It’s about trying to cultivate a childlike curiosity that people have lost or forgotten in daily life.

St Dominic, Tamar Valley: Our wooded enclave is alive again with bursting magnolia and questing bumblebees, while primroses amass on the lanes

Brilliant yellow daffodils and the pale foam of the first fruit tree blossom (cherry plum or myrobalan) draw attention from the lichens and mosses that have thrived in winter’s rain and mild gloom.

At home, in this steep orchard and encroaching woodland, the ground was used as a market garden until the 1950s. Hardy, old fashioned narcissi from those days still flower, many in their original rows and plots. Earliest to emerge are the yellows of double Van Sion (known locally as the Lent lily), Henry Irving with dainty trumpets on long stems, Princep, Helios and Carlton, already fading and past their best, succeeded by Victoria. A woodpecker has drummed for weeks and particularly cheering is the sound of a chiffchaff, returned to this partially wooded enclave.

The Belgian ceremony attracts beekeepers from the Netherlands, France and Germany keen to boost dark bee numbers and stop the spread of the hybrid honeybee

Every summer, 1,000 virgin queens descend on the Belgian town of Chimay. During the “wedding flight”, a male attaches to the female. His endophallus (penis equivalent) is torn off and he falls to the ground and dies. Mission accomplished.

Beekeepers come and pick up their fertilised queens in small colourful hives, driving them back home, sometimes more than 300km away. They will use the genetic material gathered in south Belgium to build new colonies in the Netherlands, France and Germany.