Maximizing Mealworms: Research Aims to Improve Rearing Methods
Yellow mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) have long been produced as fish bait and pet food, but their use as animal feed and even food for people is growing. Researchers are working to fine-tune methods to improve the quantity and quality of mass-reared mealworms.
Why Researchers are Re-Creating an Infamous Hitchhiker’s Month-Long Journey Around the Globe
New Zealand is working hard to keep the invasive brown marmorated stink bug from reaching its shores, and researchers there are working with colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to understand the dynamics of the pest's ocean voyage aboard cargo ships bound for the island nation, in hopes of finding new ways to detect and prevent its arrival.
Hidden Eyespot Reveals New Facets of Sexual Selection in Bicyclus Butterflies
A new study illustrates how ventral forewing patterns in Bicyclus anynana butterflies are used in sexual communication. Though the patterns are often hidden by hindwings when at rest, the study found the white, UV-reflecting eyespots to be a signal used by females to attract males.
An Inside Look at How the Varroa Mite’s True Diet Was Discovered
Some researchers willing to question conventional wisdom, some crafty experimentation, and some high-tech microscopic imagery all add up to a discovery about the Varroa destructor mite that upends years of understanding about how it parasitizes honey bees.
Pollen Sleuths: Tracking Pesticides in Honey Bee Pollen to Their Source Plant
When pesticides show up in the pollen that honey bees collect, can the source plant be pinpointed? A new study is the first to successfully combine chemical analysis of pollen and the keen eye of a palynologist—an expert in identifying pollen microscopically—to track pesticide in bee-collected pollen to a source plant genus.
Stink Bugs Stay Out: Study Measures Gaps Needed for Invasion
If a structure has a gap or entrance large enough for brown marmorated stink bugs to fit through, they will find it. But a new study shows that slits less than 3 millimeters wide and holes less than 7 millimeters wide should successfully exclude the vast majority of the bugs. A related study examines how overwintering stink bugs react to corpses of their fellow bugs remaining from previous winters.
Putting Bumble Bees in a Box Might Help Scientists Study Their Nesting Ecology
Bumble bee nests can be hard to find and study, so researchers hope they can create artificial nest boxes for them to use and be observed more easily. But will bumble bees use such boxes? New research offers some clues about optimal design and placement of bumble bee "domiciles."
Little, Fuzzy, But Not So Cute: The Hemlock Woolly Adelgid
A new profile in the Journal of Integrated Pest Management takes an in-depth look at the hemlock woolly adelgid, a pernicious pest of hemlocks in eastern North America, and the latest guidance on managing it.
When Cicada-Killer Wasps Become Cicada-Stealer Wasps
Hunting cicadas and lugging them back to a nest is hard work for a cicada-killer wasp. But sometimes all that hard work goes to waste, when a fellow wasp swoops in and lays her egg on the other wasp's prey. And that's if the cicada isn't stolen by a bird first.
How Common are Wolbachia and Other Bacteria in Insects?
New research on bacterial endosymbionts in insects suggests that such bacteria may infect a wide variety of insect species but a low proportion of individuals within those species.
Balance, Hearing, and More: Why Some Wasps Have Fat Lower Legs
The fat lower legs that dangle below flying wasps in the family Gasteruptiidae turn out to be filled with insect fat body, and they may play key roles in flight dynamics, detecting vibrations from prey, and even detoxification.
Satyrization is No Laughing Matter for Aedes Aegypti Mosquitoes, But Pickiness Has a Price
When their ranges overlap, two invasive mosquito species mate but produce no offspring, in an event known as satyrization. They can evolve quickly to learn to avoid each other, but that choosiness may cost the mosquitoes in other ways.
Khapra Beetle Can’t Beat the Heat
The khapra beetle does outsize damage to stored grains and is a top target at ports and border crossings. Researchers in Canada have found the threshold temperature that will kill the beetle at all life stages, even diapause.
In Search for Better Stink Bug Management, Scientists Look Up
A parasitoid wasp from Asia offers promise for biological control of the brown marmorated stink bug in North America, but new research suggests that monitoring efforts using primarily ground-level traps may be looking in the wrong place.
Colony Size Drives Honey Bees’ Overwinter Survival
Research in Pennsylvania shows that overall colony weight and the number of worker bees to be the leading factors in determining overwintering survival of honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies. For colonies in which the combined weight of adult bees, brood, and food stores exceeded 30 kilograms, overwinter survival rates were about 94 percent.
So Many Shot Hole Borers: New Research Charts Four Nearly Identical Species
Tiny beetles once known as tea shot hole borers are actually a group of four distinct species that appear almost exactly the same to even the trained eye. In a new study, researchers combine both physical measurements and molecular genetics to better define the members of the Euwallacea fornicatus cryptic species complex.