Celebrate National Pollinator Week with these surprisingly gorgeous portraits of bees.

A video recently doing the rounds on Facebook included a segment from the BBC comedy quiz show QI. The video asks which of avocados, almonds, melon, kiwi or butternut squash are suitable for vegans. The answer, at least according to QI, is none.

Campaigners have handed in a letter to the Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed, calling on him to support the banning of more pesticides which harm the bee population. The European Commission has already banned three pesticides because of their impact on the declining bee population, but campaigners want the commission to go further.

Bees are some of the hardest working creatures on the planet, and because of their laborious work ethic, we owe many thanks to this amazing yet often under appreciated insect. Our lives – and the world as a whole – would be a much different place if bees didn’t exist. Amit Godse, founder of Bee Basket, has taken it upon himself to save the world by saving these bees. Amit slowly became well-known in Pune as the Bee Man. This is his story!

In sophisticated night heists, thieves are stealing thousands of bees. Why?

While many scientists are focused on the decline of honey bees, relatively few study bumble bees. The good news is that a new study provides an estimate on bumble bee population and distributions across Michigan in the past century. The bad news is that these results are dramatically low, and they mirror what’s happening across the Americas, Europe and Asia, too.

Researchers from the University of New Hampshire conducted a study to document declines in about 100 wild bee species critical to pollinating crops throughout New England. What they discovered, according to the study, was a collapse in the wild bee population across the state, reported AP.

Do you bee-lieve in miracles? The bees that made their home inside three hives atop Paris’ iconic Notre Dame cathedral have survived this week’s massive blaze — even though the roof was almost completely destroyed, according to a new report. A drone photo posted by the Paris-based urban beekeeping company Beeopic on its Instagram page appears to show all three hives — which were initially believed to have been destroyed in the blaze — still in place.

Honey bees spend hours each day collecting pollen and packing it into tidy bundles attached to their hind legs. But all of that hard work could instantly be undone during a sudden rainstorm were it not for two substances the insect uses to keep the pollen firmly stuck in place: bee spit and flower oil. Now researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology are looking at that mixture of ingredients as a model for a bioinspired glue because of its unique adhesive properties and ability to remain sticky through a range of conditions.

Morgan Freeman is a lot of things. Apart from being one of the most renowned actors on the planet, the 81-year-old celebrity has time and again raised his incredible voice to call attention to a number of concerning issues. The star added yet another title to his illustrious resume as an actor, filmmaker, and director, in 2014 when he took on the label of a beekeeper. He decided to do so in order to help put an end to the dwindling bee population on the planet and do what he can to revive and conserve their presence on earth.

Everyone loves Morgan Freeman, and this amazing actor, filmmaker, and director has played numerous roles in his long career in Hollywood. However, his newest one is of high importance for all of us. Namely, he decided to help and invest to revive the bee population. Unfortunately, bees are dying off at an alarming rate, and people all around the world are trying to help. Many plant flowers for bees to visit, petition to stop the use of pesticides that destroy bees, and even start keeping bees.

Last month a search team embarked on a journey to Indonesia to find the “holy grail” of bees. The world’s largest bee, initially discovered by British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858, had not been seen since 1981.

However France has gone a step further and set the high bar in the effort to save the bees. Given the importance of pollinators to nature and the survival of the biosphere, this could not happen too soon! Studies have reported that the neonicotinoid pesticides attack the central nervous system of insects, leading to loss of memory and homing skills, in addition to reduced fertility.

The humid air in the northern Maluku Islands of Indonesia, also known as the Spice Islands, is heavy with nutmeg and clove. These lowland rainforests were the backdrop for the recent rediscovery of a remarkable animal—Wallace’s giant bee, known locally as raja ofu, meaning “king bee,” and with good reason. Wings spread, the largest specimens (who are actually queens) can be the size of an extra large chicken egg, and they sport jaws like pliers.

Found in Indonesia, the bee lives inside termite mounds.

Many animals understand numbers at a basic level for use in essential tasks such as foraging, shoaling, and resource management. However, complex arithmetic operations, such as addition and subtraction, using symbols and/or labeling have only been demonstrated in a limited number of nonhuman vertebrates. We show that honeybees, with a miniature brain, can learn to use blue and yellow as symbolic representations for addition or subtraction.

While soybean farmers watched the drift-prone weed killer dicamba ravage millions of acres of crops over the last two years, Arkansas beekeeper Richard Coy noticed a parallel disaster unfolding among the weeds near those fields. When Coy spotted the withering weeds, he realized why hives that produced 100 pounds of honey three summers ago now were managing barely half that: Dicamba probably had destroyed his bees’ food.

Bees evolved from wasp ancestors around 100 million years ago. Their shift to a vegetarian diet had a profound effect on the evolution of flowering plants. By Tim Flannery.

Bees can solve seemingly clever counting tasks with very small numbers of nerve cells in their brains, according to researchers at Queen Mary University of London.

Bees may soon get an ally in their fight against bacterial disease — one of the most serious threats the pollinators face — in the form of an edible vaccine. That's the promise held out by researchers in Finland, who say they've made the first-ever vaccine for insects, aimed at helping struggling honeybee populations.