The second new Princeton Field Guide volume scheduled to be published this coming May from Princeton University Press should really set entomologists and general naturalist buzzing, for it will take another very important but under-represented-in-print geographic group of insects as its subject: “Common Bees of Western North America.”
Over the past few years, I’ve seen a number of books about bees cross my desk. From reading and reviewing them I’ve learned quite a lot about these amazing creatures; their biology, their ecological significance, and – as particularly emphasized in so many of these books – the challenges they face surviving in the modern […]
For years we’ve been hearing story after story about the importance of conserving honeybees – specifically the European Honeybee, Apis mellifera. Then on 26 January 2018, Science magazine published “Conserving honey bees does not help wildlife” by Jonas Geldmann and Juan P. González-Varo, in which the authors reported that “managed honey bees can harm wild pollinator species.”
With the exception of ants, it’s difficult to imagine an arthropod more colonial than bees. However in thinking of bees this way, we all-to-often forget that not all bees are colonial. In Britain and Ireland, for example, there are approximately ten times more species of solitary bee than bumblebee and honeybee species combined.