Sentences with phrase «foraging bumblebees»

In the lab, the researchers used blue and yellow artificial flowers to test the visual learning performance of 85 individual foraging bumblebees from five colonies.

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.

Not exact matches

Muth plans to purchase equipment that will improve her research on the impact of pesticides on bumblebee foraging and pollination behaviors.

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.

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).

In the laboratory, Gegear and his students observed the behavior of foraging bees using arrays of paper flowers that mimicked the blooms of Mimulus lewisii (purple monkey flower), which is pollinated primarily by bumblebees, and a related species, Mimulus cardinalis (scarlet monkey flower), which is pollinated primarily by hummingbirds.

Low levels of pesticides can impact the foraging behaviour of bumblebees on wildflowers, changing their floral preferences and hindering their ability to learn the skills needed to extract nectar and pollen, according to a study co-authored by a University of Guelph professor.

Low levels of pesticides can impact the foraging behaviour of bumblebees on wild flowers, according to a study co-authored by a University of Guelph professor.

The study is the first to link exposure to thiamethoxam — one of the most commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides — to fewer fully developed eggs in queens from four wild bumblebee species that forage in farmland.

Lead author Dara Stanley, of Royal Holloway University of London, said, «Bumblebees exposed to pesticide initially foraged faster and collected more pollen.

«Ultimately, the results revealed that fast - learning bumblebees collected fewer resources for the colony over their foraging career,» said Raine, holder of the Rebanks Family Chair in Pollinator Conservation.

The absence of a single dominant bumblebee species from an ecosystem disrupts foraging patterns among a broad range of remaining pollinators in the system — from other bees to butterflies, beetles and more, field experiments show.

«We'd literally follow around the bumblebees as they foraged,» Briggs says.

Thomas said: «A consistent problem in assessing the response of bumblebees to agri - environment schemes has been that it is unclear whether a high observed abundance of bumblebees was merely an attraction of workers to sown forage patches or a genuine population level increase.

However, while common species the Garden Bumblebee (Bombus hortorum), Red - tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lapidaries) and Buff - tailed Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) fared well, there was little recorded benefit to rarer species — such as the Large Garden Bumblebee (Bombus ruderatus)-- that tend to stay closer to their nests when foraging food.

At field realistic doses, neonicotinoids cause a wide range of adverse sublethal effects in honeybee and bumblebee colonies, affecting colony performance through impairment of foraging success, brood and larval development, memory and learning, damage to the central nervous system, susceptibility to diseases, hive hygiene etc..

The U.K, team exposed buff - tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) to small doses, similar to what is expected in the wild, of a commonly used neonicotinoid pesticide called imidacloprid, and placed the bees in an enclosed natural setting where they could forage free.