It could be something like what happens with honey bees in chimneys. Honey bees think they've found a great hollow tree home with it even smelling like a tree due to creosote, but creosote levels are so high that it makes sick bee colonies. With bumblebees it might be something where bees are naturally attracted to smell thinking it's a good thing without being able to recognize there can be too much of a good thing, so will make them sick.
many larger animals self medicate and apply external anti pest substances
I watch my horse roll and rub herself on bayberry
shrubs,of which there are many in her 10 acre paddock,the bay berry is very aromatic and the seeds are so wax covered asnto be a useable source
of candle wax.
The paddock is also full of many many kinds of bees wasps and hornets,which I watch closely to see what they eat and where they shelter,with the
idea to learn.how to create ideal habitat in areas
with struggling bee populations,got a few pointers
from watching,but the tid bit above is trurly facinating
It does, but I read an article that said it’s a natural insect repellent, and that it was important (especially for big cats, who also like it) that cats not be plagued by insects, while hunting, so the conjecture was that their desire to roll in it was an evolutionary advantage.
Kinda like enjoying sex, means we do it more often.
It's easy to make claims when it comes to evolutionary biology - there's patterns everywhere - but it's almost impossible to prove anything, and most of the things that are "obvious" won't turn out to be true.
As a counterpoint, there's loads of things that get humans high that don't have any obvious benefit, why shouldn't other animals be the same?
And there's certainly loads of other plants that work just as well as pesticides, and yet they don't get cats high.
Before we consider this a problem we should be looking at the survival rate in contaminated vs uncontaminated soil. I wouldn't be at all surprised of the queens are making the right choice.
In one place I lived, there was some residue on the windows from stickers the previous tenants children had put on the windows.
There was a wasp nest on the roof and the wasps kept going for the part of the window where the stickers had been. Must have been something in there that attracted them.
They actually mention this as an alternative explanation other than missing fungi and parasites after rereading the article:
> Another possibility is that the queens could have developed an "acquired taste" for pesticides, as researchers put it, due to prior exposure in their environment.
the key might be that durring the torpor of hibernation the bees are less vulnerable to toxins
than there parasites
first question is do the parasites also hibernate
or do they continue to feed on the bees,while the bees have crawled into a chemical spill and put themselves into suspended animation for 3-4 months
and keep in mind that many insect species feed on toxic plants to deter preditors, monarch butterflys and milk weed is top of the list
> Soil treatment (n = 6; χ2 = 11.13, p = 0.049), but not contamination level (χ2 = 1.67, p = 0.196) nor the interaction between both variables (χ2 = 6.04, p = 0.302) had a significant effect on the proportion of queens found in soil crates.
> many people seem to think bees are on the edge of extinction.
There are 20000 species of bees. Europe has a 10% of the bee diversity with 1965 species present. Only in the European Union, a 9.1% of those have a status of endangered and another 5% are near endangered, this means that more than 100 species have troubles to survive, just in Europe.
Is a fact, not a just a though, that Ammobates dusmeti, Nomada siciliensis or Andrena labiatula, among other, are critically endangered.
But the real problem is that for the majority of all European species of bees (EU + rest of Europe) we just don't know what is happening. A 56% of the European bees are tagged as "Data Deficient". Even worse, there are 300 species of bees that are endemic (not found anywhere out of Europe). Most of them in the Mediterranean.
About trends on population, we know that 150 species are in a declining state and 13 are growing. For the rest, a solid 79% of the European species, we don't even know if they are increasing or decreasing its population in the last decades.
I used to run in a stretch of road on the outskirts, grass fields on both sides, from a certain sunny week every year, you could see quite a number of dead bees on the sidewalk, like 1 or 2 every 2 metres for 400 metres. Something that never noticed anywhere else
That's where you are supposed to see them, kind of, no big surprise here. It may sound surprising to some, given that bees travel by air, but they aren't good at crossing roads. When returning home after collecting the nectar they fly low and get literally hit by cars. So, apparently that place where you were running had a colony of bees on one side of the road, and their preferred food on the other, so a lot of bees were commuting daily over that dangerous place.
and then the whole phenominon moves up the food chain to crows, specificaly young crows that discover that they can get easy pickings along
certain stretches of roads,only to become road kill themselves,see it each year about this time
anapolis valley to HRM
