Bees pollinate most of the world's wild plant species and provide economically valuable pollination services to crops; yet knowledge of bee conservation biology lags far behind other taxa such as vertebrates and plants. There are few long-term data on bee populations, which makes their conservation status difficult to assess. The best-studied groups are the genus Bombus (the bumble bees), and b...

Bees provide vital pollination services to the majority of flowering plants in both natural and agricultural systems. Unfortunately, both native and managed bee populations are experiencing declines, threatening the persistence of these plants and crops. Agricultural chemicals are one possible culprit contributing to bee declines. Even fungicides, generally considered safe for bees, have been s...

Given bees' central effect on vegetation communities, it is important to understand how and why bee distributions vary across ecological gradients. We examined how plant community composition, plant diversity, nesting suitability, canopy cover, land use, and fire history affected bee distribution across an open-forest gradient in northwest Indiana, USA, a gradient similar to the historic Midwes...

Bee venom therapy has been used to treat immune-related diseases such as arthritis for a long time. Recently, it has revealed that group III secretory phospholipase A2 from bee venom (bee venom group III sPLA2) has in vitro and in vivo immunomodulatory effects. A growing number of reports have demonstrated the therapeutic effects of bee venom group III sPLA2. Notably, new experimental data have...

Evidence for declining populations of both wild and managed bees has raised concern about a potential global pollination crisis. Strategies to mitigate bee loss generally aim to enhance floral resources. However, we do not really know whether loss of preferred floral resources is the key driver of bee decline because accurate assessment of host plant preferences is difficult, particularly for s...

This paper presents a static analysis of laminated composite doubly-curved shells using refined kinematic models with polynomial and non-polynomial functions recently introduced in the literature. To be specific, Maclaurin, trigonometric, exponential and zig-zag functions are employed. The employed refined models are based on the equivalent single layer theories. A simply supported shell is sub...

assigning facilities to locations is one of the important problems, which significantly is influence in transportation cost reduction. in this study, we solve quadratic assignment problem (qap), using a meta-heuristic algorithm with deterministic tasks and equality in facilities and location number. it should be noted that any facility must be assign to only one location. in this paper, first o...

Double hexagonal chains” can be considered as benzenoids constructed by successive fusions of successive naphthalenes along a zig-zag sequence of triples of edges as appear on opposite sides of each naphthalene unit. In this paper, we discuss the numbers of k-matchings and k-independent sets of double hexagonal chains, as well as Hosoya indices and Merrifield–Simmons indices, and obtain some ex...

Digital watermarking is an important technology in today’s world for protecting multimedia content from illegal copying of data. It is a process of concealing information. The main purpose of digital watermarking provided more robustness and integrity against geometrical attacks. In this paper, various digital watermarking techniques have been discussed and identified the best technique by comp...