Abstract Honey bees are valued pollinators of agricultural crops, and heavy losses reported by beekeepers have spurred efforts to identify causes. As social insects, threats honey should be assessed evaluating the effects stress on long-term health productivity entire colony. Insect growth disruptors a class pesticides encountered that target pathways involved in insect development, reproductio...

Pollination of flowering plants is an important ecosystem service provided by wild insect pollinators and managed honey bees. Hence, losses and declines of pollinating insect species threaten human food security and are of major concern not only for apiculture or agriculture but for human society in general. Honey bee colony losses and bumblebee declines have attracted intensive research intere...

Insect pollinators are declining globally as a result of the anthropogenic pressures that have destroyed native habitats and eroded ecosystems. These declines been associated with agricultural productivity losses, threatening food security. Efforts to restore habitat for underway, emphasizing large-scale creation like wildflower strips, yet ignoring impact smaller or more isolated patch-creatio...

A substantial proportion of the worlds crops rely on insect pollination, yet for many we have little or no information as to which pollinators are most effective. Pollinator management has traditionally focussed exclusively on one species, the honeybee, Apis mellifera. Yet this bee is not able to adequately pollinate some crops, and is an unreliable pollinator in cold and wet climates. Natural ...

Recently there has been considerable concern about declines in bee communities in agricultural and natural habitats. The value of pollination to agriculture, provided primarily by bees, is >$200 billion/year worldwide, and in natural ecosystems it is thought to be even greater. However, no monitoring program exists to accurately detect declines in abundance of insect pollinators; thus, it is di...

Growing concern about the influence of climate change on flowering plants, pollinators, and the mutualistic interactions between them has led to a recent surge in research. Much of this research has addressed the consequences of warming for phenological and distributional shifts. In contrast, relatively little is known about the physiological responses of plants and insect pollinators to climat...

The effects of specific functional groups of pollinators in the diversification of angiosperms are still to be elucidated. We investigated whether the pollination shifts or the specific association with hummingbirds affected the diversification of a highly diverse angiosperm lineage in the Neotropics. We reconstructed a phylogeny of 583 species from the Gesneriaceae family and detected diversif...

Many pollinator insects, especially honey bees [ Apis mellifera Linnaeus (Apidae)] and wild bees, are experiencing population decline because of forage habitat losses. Planting perennial flowering taxa is one method increasing habitat. The objectives this study were to evaluate the potential 27 native species ornamental cultivars determine their ability attract insect pollinators in a rural an ...