More than 100 lenses inside Luke Jerram’s Pollenarium let visitors see the outside world as insects would

From the outside, it looks a little like something out of the Teletubbies.

In fact, the new installation by the Bristol artist Luke Jerram represents a grain of pollen, and the inside represents an insect’s compound eye.

After bringing injured queen Phoebee home in July, Gilly McArthur expected her soon to die, but she’s bumbling on

Fifty-two days ago, Phoebee was lying by the side of a road in the blistering sun with a broken wing. Today, she’s clambering up the arm of Gilly McArthur, around the nape of her neck and disappearing into her hair.

“I couldn’t leave her by the roadside,” McArthur says. “So I bought her home and made her a bed of flowers. I thought she’d be dead in a day or so.”

Experts say invasive species are creating ‘pollinator deserts’ and could have serious impact on food security

British beekeepers have called for a national awareness campaign about the impact of Asian hornets as they warned the invasive species was creating “pollinator deserts” and threatening food security.

Native to south-east Asia, the yellow-legged hornet is thought to have arrived in Europe in 2004 and has continued to spread ever since, its numbers probably boosted by increasingly warm springs and summers.

Bombus dahlbomii, a giant ginger bumblebee fondly known as the flying mouse, is in decline in its native Patagonia due to commercial farming

• Revealed: the top 10 invertebrates of the year

We all love bumblebees. Not only are they beautiful, busy and social, they perform pollination services that are crucial for plants, crops and human civilisation.

Any bumblebee would be a worthy winner of invertebrate of the year but a gorgeous giant ginger bumblebee fondly known as the flying mouse? Come on!

Ibrahim al-Dabba continues to care for his colonies despite losing his home and most of his hives and equipment

Each morning, Ibrahim Naji al-Dabba climbs to the roof of a damaged residential tower in Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood, where rows of beehives sit surrounded by shattered concrete and the scars of war. The rooftop is far from an ideal place for beekeeping, but for the 49-year-old father of seven, it is the only place where he can continue the profession that has sustained his family for decades.

Before the war, al-Dabba owned more than 400 beehives spread across eastern Gaza. His apiaries, equipment, storage facilities, and four-wheel-drive vehicle allowed him to manage a thriving beekeeping business that supported his family. Today, almost everything he built over years of work has disappeared.

Ibrahim Naji al-Dabba, 49, (in green) working with his sons. He was displaced from the Shuja’iyya area, east of Gaza City to Tel al- to the south

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.