As Cop17 kicks off, records since 1921 show more bee species declining than increasing in all parts of Europe except the Alps

Most of Europe’s wild bee species and about half of its hover fly species have declined over the last century, a study has found, as a UN biodiversity summit begins in Armenia.

Records since 1921 show more bee species are declining than increasing in all parts of Europe except the Alpine region. The richness of bee and hover fly species suffered a persistent drop in the Atlantic and Continental regions, the study found, though trends in other regions were mixed or even positive.

As a surge in beekeepers has led to increased numbers of honeybees, researchers record them pushing bumblebees and other rival species away from flowers

Honeybees are outcompeting wild pollinators for resources by aggressively bumping into them and chasing them away from flowers, research has shown.

The study, by researchers from Anglia Ruskin University, found that areas where there were higher concentrations of honeybees had fewer wild pollinators, such as bumblebees, solitary bees and hoverflies.

At Bybi in Copenhagen, a dedicated group of staff and volunteers have built a community for all centred on the production of honey – much of which is given away for nothing. Could it be replicated elsewhere?

The bees at Bybi, a collective of beekeepers in Copenhagen, live on the roof. Their home is a complex of Victorian buildings, right in the centre of the city, that looks like an idealised vision of the modern social enterprise, ennobled by the architecture of the past. It’s a place of cottage industry in concert with nature, where the marginalised are brought in from the fringes and corporations stand waiting to help, where jobs happen but a lot of the work is done by volunteers, and where – this bit is important – a lot of time is spent discussing ideas.

Oliver Maxwell, Bybi’s 48-year-old founder, encourages me to examine the buildings more closely. They were once a prison, a workhouse and a hospital; their functions today – a homeless shelter, a young offender institution and, until recently, a job centre – are not so different. Denmark’s Victorian transformation, from “agricultural backwater to industrialised agriculture”, was reflected in how they treated people, Maxwell says.

Citizen scientists on UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme recorded insect visits to flowers during 10-minute surveys

Ubiquitous urban plants often derided as “weeds” are the most attractive to pollinating insects.

The autumn blooms of common ivy, rich in pollen and nectar, are the most visited by insects including bees and butterflies, according to an eight-year study.

Four native species selected after consultation, but which one adorns which note is yet to be decided

Bees, barn owls, puffins and hedgehogs have been picked to feature on the next generation of banknotes, the Bank of England has announced.

The quartet of creatures were selected after a large-scale consultation settled on wild animals as the theme, with members of the public then asked to pick their favourites out of 18 options divided into three categories.

Apiarists will lose not just the insects but the value of pollination contracts, which can be worth thousands of dollars

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An estimated 800,000 bees, worth tens of thousands of dollars, have been stolen from properties in far north Queensland.

The industry is already reeling from the this month’s arrival of the varroa mite parasite.

Initiative aims to keep alive age-old skill, and at Muchelney Abbey in Somerset improve habitat for rare shrill carder bee

It sounds like something out of a Thomas Hardy novel: a merry band of men and women roaming the West Country cutting meadows by hand in exchange for hunks of bread and cheese.

But the conservation charity English Heritage is recruiting a team of volunteer scythers to maintain 21st-century meadowland in the old-fashioned way.

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.