Sentences with phrase «bumblebees visiting»

They studied captive colonies of bumblebees visiting buzz - pollinated flowers, monitoring their behaviour and collecting bee buzzes using microphones.

Across the steps of the pollination process, from patterns of bumblebee visits to plants, to picking up pollen, to seed production, the researchers saw a cascading effect of removing one bee species.

Typically, when honeybees and bumblebees visit flowers for nectar, they brush much of the pollen that powders their bodies into pocketlike structures on their legs to carry home for bee larvae to eat.

Not exact matches

Now, strolling through his fields on a spring day, he recognizes a variety of insects visiting the blossoms — from plump bumblebees to slender, iridescent solitary bees.

Several small studies have already raised the possibility that the substantial number of viruses and parasites plaguing commercial honeybees and bumblebees are spreading to wild bees that visit the same flowers (SN: 8/16/08, p. 10).

The researchers allowed bumblebee foragers to feed on an array of artificial flowers and used harmonic radar technology to follow individuals continuously over every foraging trip they made as they gradually developed solutions to the problem of how to visit them all.

When they looked at the flowers visited by the alpine bumblebee species, they found that the bees» favorite flowers had not shifted to a shallower form, but were less prolific.

Bumblebees, like most pollinators, are not genetically programmed to visit only particular flowers, Gegear says.

To understand how floral characteristics can combine to influence the decisions bumblebees make about which flowers to visit, Robert Gegear, assistant professor of biology and biotechnology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), had bees forage on arrays of paper representations of typical «hummingbird flowers» (red coloration, horizontal orientation) and «bee flowers» (lavender or blue coloration, upright orientation).

However, when red flowers were placed in the horizontal orientation and lavender flowers were placed in a vertical orientation — mimicking the natural flowers of Mimulus cardinalis and Mimulus lewisii — visits by foraging bumblebees dropped dramatically.

But a recent paper in the journal Ecology suggests that flowers that are visited almost exclusively by hummingbirds are actually designed not to lure birds, but to deter bumblebees and their wasteful visits.

In this new study, the researchers found that, while bumblebees exposed to pesticides collected more pollen than control bees, control bees were able to learn how to manipulate these complex flowers after fewer visits.

Just last month, for example, a team reported that bumblebees may use electrical fields to identify flowers recently visited by other insects from those that may still hold lucrative stores of nectar and pollen.

«We can see this shift in who visits which plant even in pollinators that are not closely related to the bumblebee species that we remove from the system.»

If a single, dominant species of bumblebee mainly visits an alpine sunflower, for instance, other pollinators — including other species of bumblebees — are less likely to visit alpine sunflowers.

After just 11 generations, they found that the plants visited by bumblebees were taller, twice as fragrant, and reflected more UV light — a visual signal for bees.

When we visited Bumblebee at his Culver City studio, he shared, «I feel that the children in the paintings are exactly where they belong at that particular moment in their childhood which we all can relate to.»