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Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea. They are currently considered a clade, called Anthophila. There are over 20,000 known species of bees in seven recognized biological families. Some species – including honey bees, bumblebees, and stingless bees – live socially in colonies while most species (>90%) – including mason bees, carpenter bees, leafcutter bees, and sweat bees – are solitary.
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The European dark bee is a subspecies of the western honey bee, evolving in central Asia, with a proposed origin of the Tien Shan Mountains and later migrating into eastern and then northern Europe after the last ice age from 9,000BC onwards. Its original range included the southern Urals in Russia and stretched through northern Europe and down to the Pyrenees. They are one of the two members of the 'M' lineage of Apis mellifera, the other being in western China. Traditionally they were called the Black German Bee, although they are now considered endangered in Germany. However today they are more likely to be called after the geographic / political region in which they live such as the British Black Bee, the Native Irish Honey Bee, the Cornish Black Bee and the Nordic Brown Bee, even though they are all the same subspecies, with the word "native" often inserted by local beekeepers, even in places where the bee is an introduced foreign species. It was domesticated in Europe and hives were brought to North America in the colonial era in 1622 where they were referred to as the English Fly by the Native Americans.
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Jeremy Field is a Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Exeter. Prior to this, he was a senior lecturer in the Department of Biology at University College London between 1995 and 2007, and Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Sussex from 2007 to 2016.
May Roberta Berenbaum is an American entomologist whose research focuses on the chemical interactions between herbivorous insects and their host plants, and the implications of these interactions on the organization of natural communities and the evolution of species. She is particularly interested in nectar, plant phytochemicals, honey and bees, and her research has important implications for beekeeping.
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Marla Spivak is an American entomologist, and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota specializing in apiculture and social insects.
Thomas Dyer Seeley is the Horace White Professor in Biology in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University. He is the author of several books on honeybee behavior, including Honeybee Democracy (2010) and The Wisdom of the Hive (1995) He was the recipient of the Humboldt Prize in Biology in 2001. He primarily studies swarm intelligence by investigating how bees collectively make decisions.
Adam Hart is an English scientist, author and broadcaster, specialising in ecology, entomology and conservation, especially in southern Africa. He has co-presented three BBC TV documentaries on social insects. Hart has written and presented numerous BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service documentaries and written more than 120 scientific papers.
Mark L. Winston is a Canadian biologist and writer. A professor of apiculture and social insects at Simon Fraser University, he spent much of his career studying bees until becoming founding director of the university's Centre for Dialogue in 2006.
Christina Grozinger is an American entomologist, the Publius Vergilius Maro Professor of Entomology at Pennsylvania State University and the director at its Center for Pollinator Research.
Ellouise "Elli" Leadbeater is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist in the UK. In 2019 she was appointed Professor of Ecology and Evolution at Royal Holloway, University of London.
References
- ↑ University of Sussex bio, https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p128567-francis-ratnieks
- ↑ Biography from a page on a talk held by the Headstrong Club in Lewes, East Sussex, http://headstrongclub.co.uk/2018/01/11/francis-ratnieks-how-endangered-is-the-honey-bee-and-how-can-we-help-23-02-18/
- ↑ Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects page at the University of Sussex, https://www.sussex.ac.uk/lasi/
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