"Ivy, often maligned as a garden pest, is vital to honey bees and other pollinators seeking food in autumn, new research from the University of Sussex reveals.

The research, carried out by scientists at the University's Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects (LASI) is published online today (26 April 2013) in the journal Insect Conservation and Diversity.


Honey bees returning from successful forage trips perform the waggle dance to tell nest mates where to find nectar and pollen-rich flowers (the dance indicates the direction and distance to the flowers). Researchers video then decode the waggle dances and use the data to find out how far bees fly, where they go to and what types of plants they are feeding on at different times in the year.

The main findings were:

• On average 89 per cent of pollen pellets brought by worker bees to hives were from ivy. There was no difference between hives located in an urban (Brighton) versus a rural area (University of Sussex).
• 80 per cent of honey bees foraging on ivy were collecting nectar not pollen.
• Ivy nectar was high quality, with a lot of sugar (49 per cent).
• Ivy flowers are visited by a wide range of insects, such as late-season butterflies, hover flies, other types of flies, wasps, bumble bees, and the ivy bee (a bee that specialises on ivy). Insects were attracted to ivy flowers in large numbers in both urban and rural areas.
• Ivy is common and available to insects in both town and countryside."

The honey and the ivy: Why gardeners' foe is the bees' friend
by Maggie Clune

  "The electric fields that build up on honey bees as they fly, flutter their wings, or rub body parts together may allow the insects to talk to each other, a new study suggests. Tests show that the electric fields, which can be quite strong, deflect the bees' antennae, which, in turn, provide signals to the brain through specialized organs at their bases.

Scientists have long known that flying insects gain an electrical charge when they buzz around. That charge, typically positive, accumulates as the wings zip through the air—much as electrical charge accumulates on a person shuffling across a carpet. And because an insect's exoskeleton has a waxy surface that acts as an electrical insulator, that charge isn't easily dissipated, even when the insect lands on objects, says Randolf Menzel, a neurobiologist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany...

Now, in a series of lab tests, Menzel and colleagues have studied how honey bees respond to electrical fields. In experiments conducted in small chambers with conductive walls that isolated the bees from external electrical fields, the researchers showed that a small, electrically charged wand brought close to a honey bee can cause its antennae to bend. Other tests, using antennae removed from honey bees, indicated that electrically induced deflections triggered reactions in a group of sensory cells, called the Johnston's organ, located near the base of the antennae. In yet other experiments, honey bees learned that a sugary reward was available when they detected a particular pattern of electrical field.

The team's findings 'are very significant,' says Fred Dyer, a behavioral biologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. 'I hadn't heard about the possibility that honey bees could use electrical fields.'

One of the honey bees' forms of communication is the 'waggle dance.' When the insects have located a dense patch of flowers or a source of water, they skitter across the honeycomb in their hive in a pattern related to the direction of and the distance to the site. Fellow worker bees then take that information and forage accordingly. The biggest mystery about the dance, Dyer says, is which senses the bees use—often in the deep, dark recesses of their hive—to conduct their communication. 'People have proposed a variety of methods: direct contact between bees, air currents from the buzzing of their wings, odors, even vibrations transmitted through the honeycomb itself,' he says.

But the team's new findings introduce yet another mode of communication available to the insects, Dyer says. He notes that the group found that antenna deflections induced by an electrically charged honey bee wing are about 10 times the size of those that would be caused by airflow from the wing fluttering at the same distance—a sign that electrical fields could be an important signal.

'They show that the electrical fields are there and that they're within the range of what the animal can sense,' Dyer says. Their claim of evidence is quite compelling.'"


Bees Buzz Each Other, but Not the Way You Think
by Sid Perkins

" Honeybees are known to communicate in a dance language called the waggle dance to point out the location of resources that keep the hive alive, but new research reveals that gravity can mess with this dance's accuracy.
The waggle dance is an important part of how they provide for the bee community. Foragers go out, find food, water or other resources, and come back to signal the location to the rest of hive to go out and harvest.
The dance signals the direction of the food patch in relation to the sun, which is always interpreted by the other bees as straight up (regardless of where it is in the sky). If the dancing bee positions its body straight up, that indicates to the other bees to fly straight toward where the sun is on the horizon. If the dancer angles her body with face pointing down toward the ground, which means the food patch is located directly opposite the sun's position on the horizon.When bees signaled angles close to the horizon, like 90 or 270 degrees, they seemed to have much more trouble staying on point than when walking directly up or down. The researchers think that horizontal angles are more difficult because the bees need to work against gravity to stay in a straight line."

How Gravity Messes with Honeybees' Waggle Dance
By Jennifer Welsh | LiveScience.com