insects
 To help raise awareness of Colony Collapse disorder Haagen-Dazs produced this video and put together the website Help the Honey Bees.
It is a fact of nature: When a honey bee returns to the hive after finding a good source of nectar, it will perform a unique dance for its hive mates, detailing the distance, quality and quantity of the new food supply. Sadly, honey bees are mysteriously vanishing in staggering numbers - a crisis known as Colony Collapse disorder - which is alarming considering honey bees are responsible for pollinating one-third of our natural food supply.
Link to video. Link to Help the Honey Bees. [via Neatorama]
Over the weekend, Jason, Colleen (Jason's mom) and Ted (beekeeping expert) split their hive in order to set up a secondary hive in another location. Chris Wiggins witnessed the hive splitting and lived to tell the tale. He wrote a great post over on his blog Beautiful Bokeh and also shared amazing photos he took on that day.
Link to Beautiful Bokeh. Link to photo gallery.
Update: Jason wrote up a post over at Make: Blog about his hive splitting experience and provides information on how to start your own backyard beehive. Link.
They don't look much like cockroaches, but the robotic cockroaches created by Belgium researchers managed to infiltrate and influence cockroach colonies' behaviors.
Halloy and his colleagues suspected that a group decision emerges because every individual follows these simple rules: Wander around randomly, but spend more time in a place if you sense that it is (A) dark and (B) has other cockroaches.
So the researchers made sure their robotic cockroach could follow those rules. The robots had wheels, plus a light sensor and an infrared sensor to detect nearby roaches.
When they put these robots in with the living roaches, they all began to interact. Before long, the robots and cockroaches were huddled together under the same roof. "The robots and the cockroaches behave as a group," Halloy said.
So then the scientists decided to reprogram the robots and change one of their rules. "We change their preference for darkness," Halloy said. "We make the robots prefer lighter places than darker ones."
And they presented the group of robots and roaches with two shelters. One was dark, and one was light.
What the scientists found was that the whole group would generally end up resting in the brighter place, even though normally roaches would prefer a darker one.
The experiment, published in the journal Science, showed that just a few individuals can dramatically alter the behavior of the whole group.
Link [via digg]
I knew the real reason for not making my bed every morning wasn't pure laziness... it was to keep the dust mites away. Yeah, that's right.
Research suggests that while an unmade bed may look scruffy it is also unappealing to house dust mites thought to cause asthma and other allergies.
A Kingston University study discovered the bugs cannot survive in the warm, dry conditions found in an unmade bed.
The average bed could be home to up to 1.5 million house dust mites.
The bugs, which are less than a millimetre long, feed on scales of human skin and produce allergens which are easily inhaled during sleep.
The warm, damp conditions created in an occupied bed are ideal for the creatures, but they are less likely to thrive when moisture is in shorter supply.
Link [via Neatorama]
If you have a sweet-tooth and enjoy the cold, wet slime of worms in your mouth than you will definitely dig these insect candies by Hotlix. [via MeFi]
Buddhist monks in the Hong Hock See Temple are plagued with a stinging red ant infestation, which has caused one worshipper to be sent to the hospital for treatment for several bites.
In most infestation problems people would call the exterminator or start stomping those bugs dead, but Buddhist monks practice nonviolence by which they are bound by faith to not hurt any living creature.
They have had this problem for a year and have been unable to find any nonviolent methods to rid their temple of the ants. At this point, all they can do is "shake them off".
[Image: "Fire Ant" taken by Jason Striegel. San Pablo City, Philippines. 2006]
 Crop pollinating bees across the nation (approximately in 22 states) are mysteriously disappearing (called Colony Collapse Disorder) at rates up to 60 percent. Researchers, beekeepers and farmers are baffled as to why massive amounts of bee colonies are disappearing at such an enormous rate.
Researchers have pinpointed some possibilities for this strange tragedy:
- More stress--to increase pollination frequency, bees are being raised to survive a shorter off-season, which could be lowering their immunity to viruses
- Hive-damaging mites
- Improperly applied pesiticides
- Viruses
Although researchers have thoughts as to why the bees are dying off, no definite conclusions can be made because there are no traces of dead bees around or within miles of their beehives. Because of this researchers are unable to perform any autopsies on the dead bees. Because bees are essential to pollinating the nations crops, significant economic stress may or will occur. Related articles: Honeybees, Gone With the Wind, Leave Crops and Keepers in Peril ( NYTimes, requires free registration to view full article) Vanishing bees threaten US crops (BBC) Honeybees disappearing at alarming rate, cause unknown ( Digital Journal)
 Having excellent eyesight, particularly in ultraviolet wavelengths, jumping spiders come equipped with glowing patches on their bodies to attract mates.
Scientists led by Matthew Lim of the University of Singapore videotaped pairs of male and female jumping spiders under full-spectrum light—which includes UV light—and under UV-blocked light.
Under ultraviolet light, the male and female were seen to hit the "dance floor" with their bodies aglow: Turns out, females have their own “glow stick”—their front appendages, called palps, glowed in a bright green hue under UV light.
As courtship progressed, the male arched its body, vibrated its palps and slinked on tiptoe toward the female. The female spider hunched, seeming to play hard to get, and then scampered away.
Researchers also observed the spiders when one sex was in full-spectrum light and the other in UV-deficient light. When a partner was not lit up by UV, the females showed no interest, suggesting that a male must show its good before courtship can proceed. Males ignored or showed much less interest in females under UV-blocked light.
Here is the video in which you can view a male and female "raving". (Note: TV spot will play before the actual footage.)
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Here is an interesting photo gallery of bees creating a 
Here is a very cute, very adorable Flickr photoset of 
