bees

Bees have always shown what it means to live in a harmonious system of collaboration. These tiny insects are a testament that a team made up of hard-working, determined, and well-organized members can be endowed with the greatest of tasks.

Damage to bee populations has wide-ranging effects.

What turns a colony of obedient worker bees into a chaotic swarm of murderous, sexual rebellion? It's in the beeswax.

As rising temperatures cause flower populations to decline, bumblebees' tongues are getting shorter in an apparent trend away from specialization. Scientists believe that having shorter tongues allows the bees to be more generalized when it comes to the flowers they visit, giving them a wider range of food sources to choose from.

"Honey is thought of as more natural whereas white sugar and high fructose corn syrup are processed from the cane or the beet or the corn," said Raatz, whose paper appears in the Journal of Nutrition. "We wanted to find out if they were different. But chemically, they are very, very similar, and that's what it seems to break down to."

A new study found that not only did bees show no signs of avoiding neonicotinoid-laced food in lab tests, they seemed to prefer it.

While the film was released in 2009, Maryam Henein recently spent about a month in Costa Rica, where she screened the film in unusual venues, including this year’s Envision Festival in Uvita.