Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder has always interested me, because I'm interested in insect pathology - and this is probably the most important insect-pathology related event we'll see in our lifetimes. I've written about CCD here at Biofortified, first in my…
Everybody needs to eat. Agriculture is the cornerstone of civilization, and by 2100 we'll need to be a lot better at agriculture because there may be as many as 11 billion people on this planet. Unfortunately, agriculture is also extremely…
Finding funding for some research projects is incredibly difficult, especially for newer researchers. For phenomena which have only been recently described, finding funding is even more difficult than finding funding for more established research areas. Because of this, there are…
A recent paper published in The Bulletin of Insectology claiming that neonicotinoids are the sole cause of CCD has been circulating in the media. The author, Chensheng Lu, has a history of doing research that makes spurious claims about the…
Read More Are Neonicotinoids the Sole Factor Responsible for Colony Collapse Disorder?
What happens when a caterpillar eats the Bt protein? Learn all the details in this post.
Parasitoids play a huge role in regulating insect populations. They have a lot of tools to do this, including using genetic modification to disable the immune systems of their hosts, as I described in Polydnaviruses: Nature's GMOs. In agriculture, if you…
Read More Strepsipteran genome brings us a step closer to solving an entomological enigma
Shortly after I graduated high school, commercial apiaries started to report massive losses of honeybees. Honeybees are probably the most economically valuable insects in the world, and are responsible for pollinating most of the food we eat. Here in the…
While researchers have been making progress in discovering causes of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), we still don't have all the answers. Some of you may remember awhile back when I wrote about a fly called Apocephalus borealis. This fly was discovered…
Read More Get involved in citizen science… help the honeybees!
When it comes to public relations, few animals have problems as severe as spiders. There are two kinds of confirmed medically significant species of spider in the US, the widows (genus Latrodectus) and the recluses (genus Loxoceles). Although diagnoses of…
Longtime readers might know I have a bit of an affinity for a specific family of flies, the Phorid flies. I think they're cool because many have either decomposer or parasitoid habits. The last time they were in the news,…
