Four main evolutionary lineages of A. mellifera have been described including eastern Europe (C) and western and northern Europe (M). Many apiculturists prefer bees from the C lineage due to their docility and high productivity. In France, the routine importation of bees from the C lineage has resulted in the widespread admixture of bees from the M lineage. The haplodiploid nature of the honeyb...

Crop productivity is improved by ecosystem services, including pollination, but this should be set in the context of trade-offs among multiple management practices. We investigated the impact of pollination services on coffee production, considering variation in fertilization, irrigation, shade cover, and environmental variables such as rainfall (which stimulates coffee flowering across all pla...

Loss of suitable seminatural habitats and homogenization of crop types have led to the population decline of pollinating insects in farmland. As these insects support crop production, many practical efforts aim to sustain pollinator diversity which is especially challenging in intensively managed and homogeneous farmland. However, there are ongoing changes of the farmland toward its multifuncti...

Pollination contributes to an estimated one third of global food production, through both the improvement of the yield and the quality of crops. Volatile compounds emitted by crop flowers mediate plant-pollinator interactions, but differences between crop varieties are still little explored. We investigated whether the visitation of crop flowers is determined by variety-specific flower volatile...

Many services generated by forest ecosystems provide essential support for human well-being. However, the vulnerability of these services to environmental change such as forest fragmentation are still poorly understood. We present spatial modeling of the generation of ecosystem services in a human-dominated landscape where forest habitat patches, protected by local taboos, are located in a matr...

Intensive beekeeping to mitigate crop pollination deficits and habitat loss may cause interspecific competition between bees. Studies show negative correlations between flower visitation of honey bees (Apis mellifera) and wild bees, but effects on the reproduction of wild bees were not proven. Likely reasons are that honey bees can hardly be excluded from controls and wild bee nests are general...

1. Honeybees could remain in continuous free flight at extremely high air temperatures (up to at least 46 °C). 2. The metabolic rate in free flight, 80-85 ml O2 g body weight" 1 h", was independent of air temperature (TA) over a span of at least 22 °C. 3. The bees' ability to fly at high TA was due to their ability to maintain thoracic temperature (TTb) near TA despite prodigious rates of heat ...

Differing conclusions have been reached as to how or whether varying heat production has a thermoregulatory function in flying honeybees Apis mellifera. We investigated the effects of air temperature on flight metabolic rate, water loss, wingbeat frequency, body segment temperatures and behavior of honeybees flying in transparent containment outdoors. For periods of voluntary, uninterrupted, se...

Several factors influence fruit set and yield in strawberry production. Bees play an important role pollinating flowers; however, bee populations are decreasing due to air pollution a...

Executive Summary 3 1: Introduction 9 2: Factors causing bee declines – implications for agriculture 15 3: Ecological farming versus industrial agriculture – impacts on bees 21 4: Ecological pest control to eliminate the use of synthetic chemical pesticides 39 Appendix 1 54 Appendix 2 56 3 The drastic decline of wild and managed bee populations recorded in recent years in Europe and North Ameri...