Bee Conservation

25/09/2026

Bees 'facial expressions' may be a sign of their inner lives
It's easy for us to tell if someone is enjoying their meal or not. They lick their lips if they like it, grimace if they don't.
Our new research, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows we might be able to read insects' facial expressions in a similar way.

This offers potential insights into their inner lives—and builds on a wave of new work that is daring to suggest insects might have a form of consciousness.

An idea dating back to Darwin

Humans read each other's expressions and body language all the time. By doing so, we can typically get a pretty accurate read on what another person is feeling.

Naturalist Charles Darwin was one of the first to discuss how facial expressions in other animals might also give us a read on their emotions.

Most dog owners would agree that dogs can communicate clearly through body language and expression when they are joyful, afraid or in pain. In mammals, at least, basic features of facial expressions associated with liking and wanting seem to be deeply conserved through evolution.

Psychologist and neuroscientist Kent Berridge and his colleagues pointed out just how eerily similar the facial expressions of newborn human babies and baby rats are when they receive a surprising sweet treat versus a bitter one. In both species, the former triggered lip licking, whereas the latter triggered a mouth gape of revulsion.

Based on a combination of careful neurobiological and behavioral studies, Berridge has convincingly argued that we can use facial expressions to read what a rat likes and dislikes, and he has used this as a measure to understand the neurobiology of liking in rats.

What about other animals with radically different brains, bodies and faces? What about, say, insects?

Getting a read on an insect's inner life

Insects have a hard exoskeleton. Their faces are impassive masks, but bumblebees do have highly mobile mouthparts. They can extend their long glossa (the equivalent of a tongue) to reach deep into flowers to sip nectar.

In experiments performed at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, colleagues and I studied how bumblebees moved their glossa and other mouthparts when sampling different tastes.

To a single bumblebee, we offered a tiny droplet of sugar water from a pipette. The bee vigorously extended her glossa to drink the droplet, but even after she finished drinking and the pipette was taken away, she kept extending and retracting her glossa into thin air—almost as if smacking her lips.

By stark contrast, when we offered the bee a droplet of dilute salty water, she sampled it with her glossa, then backed away shaking her head and wiping her glossa as if in disgust.

Testing alternative explanations

Could these responses be simply innate reactions of the glossa to the different chemistry of sugar and salt?

To test this, we changed the bee's physiological state. We heated the bee to 40°C (104°F) for a short time. While this didn't harm the bee, it was equivalent to the bee being active on a hot day and caused her to become dehydrated.

Now when we offered the bee dilute salty water, rather than shaking her head and wiping her mouth, she drank thirstily and showed those glossa extensions.

This showed the glossa movements were not automatic responses to sugar and salt. Rather, they had more to do with the bee's physiological state. A dehydrated bee needs dilute salty water, and now when offered it she showed the glossa extension responses she would otherwise show to sweet sugar.

It's somewhat like those oral rehydration electrolyte drinks. Most of the time, they are bearable—just. But if you have just completed a long run and are dehydrated, they taste so much better.

In other experiments, we directly manipulated the bees' neurochemistry.

We found that if we treated bees with different neurochemicals, we could change the glossa response to sugar. Bees treated with the neuromodulators octopamine and dopamine were more reactive to sugar, but did not show those post-drinking glossa protrusions to a sucrose drop.

However, bees treated with an endocannabinoid (a different neuromodulatory system that in mammals is related to mood, appetite and physiological regulation) showed enhanced post-drinking glossa protrusions, but were not more reactive to sugar.

This told us two things. First, the glossa protrusion is independent of a sugar reaction. Second, very specific changes in bee neurochemistry can enhance the glossa protrusion response.

A subjective inner state

Together, these experiments showed that the glossa responses were subjective to the bee, related to her physiological state, and not simple reactions to chemicals.

This evidence suggests the bee's responses to what it likes and dislikes are similar to those of humans and other mammals. At the very least, we can say that the bee's responses gave us a read on her subjective inner physiological state.

Does our study tell us conclusively that a bee feels emotions like liking and disliking? No. But it does add to the body of work showing that insects have some sort of inner life and are more than mere reflex machines.

Now that we can read bees' faces to get a read on their subjective state, we can do a lot more work to probe what the inner life of an insect is like.

Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

15/09/2026

Spider venoms could stop deadly varroa mites killing honey bees.

Spider venoms contain ingredients that could lead to a new treatment to protect honeybees from the deadly Varroa destructor mite, according to a study led by the University of the Sunshine Coast. Researchers identified components in the venoms of the Tasmanian cave spider and the giant Japanese funnel-web spider that killed the parasitic mites without harming the bees. The study is published in the journal npj Drug Discovery.

Lead author UniSC Associate Professor Volker Herzig said the discovery was the first step in finding a new, environmentally friendly way to combat varroa mites, which were destroying honeybee colonies across the globe.

"We screened 50 venoms, mostly from spiders and scorpions, by applying them externally to the mites. We found more than 75% killed the mites within 24 hours. We selected two of the most potent spider venoms for further analysis," Dr. Volker Herzig said.

"We isolated a specific component, called a peptide, from each of these two venoms and applied them to the bodies of varroa mites. The peptides killed only the mites, while the bees survived.

"These peptides, which we named Ht1a and Gg1a, are fully biodegradable and our findings suggest they could be developed into a commercial, sustainable treatment for varroa mite infestations in honeybee hives."

Resistance is driving the search

Alternative treatments are urgently needed as the mites become increasingly resistant to existing chemical pesticides, leading to widespread destruction of bee colonies in Australia and across much of the Northern Hemisphere.

The study involved collaborators from UniSC, the University of Queensland, the University of Oslo, Ghent University in Belgium, and the Swiss Bee Research Center Agroscope in Switzerland.

He said the next steps would include testing the two peptides on honeybees carrying varroa mites and applying them in mite-infested beehives to assess how well they work under real-world conditions.

The venoms used in the study came from Herzig's arachnid venom biobank (currently comprising 640 spider and 230 scorpion venoms), which is the largest in the world.

UniSC Vice-Chancellor and President Helen Bartlett said the research was making a significant contribution toward solving a global challenge.

"This world-class research led by UniSC is tackling one of the most urgent threats to global food security," she said. "It reflects UniSC's commitment to sustainability, with the research aiming to protect agriculture in Australia and around the world."

Publication details
Volker Herzig et al, Spider venom peptides Ht1a and Gg1a are toxic to honeybee parasite Varroa destructor by topical application, npj Drug Discovery (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s44386-026-00050-9
Journal information: npj Drug Discovery

03/08/2026

Australia has already spent more than $100 million dealing with Varroa mite. Here's what we can do next

The honeybee mite, Varroa destructor, finally breached Australia's biosecurity defenses four years ago, and is here to stay. Even more concerning, our standard treatments—such as specialised pesticides—are already failing.

What does this mean for Australians, and what can we do about it?

Roughly the size of a pinhead, the parasitic mite is regarded as the most destructive pest of honeybees worldwide. It feeds on bees, weakening colonies and causing their collapse.

For decades, Australia was the only continent free of the mite. That changed in 2022, when Varroa was detected in sentinel hives at the Port of Newcastle, New South Wales.

An ambitious eradication campaign was launched, but abandoned by 2023. Today, Varroa is established across much of Australia's eastern and southern states. The focus has shifted from eradication to management, and we now face a new threat—treatment-resistant mites.

Varroa is more than just a beekeeping problem. Managed honeybees underpin a significant portion of Australian agriculture, contributing about A$14 billion annually. More than 30% of food production depends on pollination from bees. When bee colonies collapse, the effects ripple through food production, farm profitability and, ultimately, food prices.

Native pollinators also play an important role, but they cannot fully replace managed honeybees for many large-scale crops.

This makes the health of honeybee populations critical to both food security and biodiversity.

Chemical control is under pressure

Controlling Varroa is costly and labor-intensive for both commercial and backyard beekeepers. Current strategies rely heavily on chemical miticides—a type of pesticide engineered to control mites. These fall into two broad groups.

"Hard" miticides, such as formamidines (amitraz or Apivar) and pyrethroids (Bayvarol), are synthetic chemicals designed to kill mites quickly. "Soft" miticides, including formic acid, oxalic acid and thymol, are naturally derived compounds that tend to linger less in the environment.

While these treatments can suppress mite populations, they're not a long-term solution. Varroa is well known to evolve resistance, and pyrethroid- and amitraz-resistant Varroa mites have already been found in Australia less than four years after the mite's arrival.

A new generation of pest control

As conventional treatments falter, researchers are exploring new technologies. One of the most promising is RNA interference, or RNAi. RNA is a molecule found in all living organisms that helps control how genes are expressed.

RNAi is a natural process in which small RNA fragments "switch off" specific genes, blocking the production of essential proteins pests need to survive. The RNA fragments can be delivered to bees via sugar syrup. This then gets distributed through the hive, and Varroa are exposed either by feeding or absorption.

RNAi pesticides are designed to be species-specific, meaning they're unlikely to cause harm to other organisms. This makes them more desirable than chemical pesticides that can have widespread effects on beneficial insects, the environment and even human health if not applied correctly.

RNAi treatments are also unlikely to give rise to genetic resistance. This is because resistance usually involves single-point changes in the gene sequence, while these treatments target larger gene segments. RNAi is also exceptionally safe because it doesn't linger in the environment as much as a chemical pesticide might.

Furthermore, RNAi doesn't create genetically modified organisms, because the RNA fragments don't become part of the host genome.

Not just theoretical

RNAi pesticides are no longer theoretical. In 2025, the United States approved the first RNAi-based Varroa treatment, marketed as Norroa. This product targets a gene essential for mite reproduction, effectively acting as a form of "birth control" that reduces population growth within hives.

However, Norroa has its limitations. Because it suppresses reproduction rather than killing mites outright, it's most effective when mite numbers are low. In heavily infested colonies, it can't reduce populations quickly enough to prevent collapse.

Research is now focused on making RNAi more effective and adaptable. One key question is which genes to target. Many current research approaches focus on "housekeeping" genes—ones essential to mite biology and therefore survival. But these are often similar across species, raising the risk that the treatment could kill other species we don't want to wipe out.

Our research group is exploring an alternative strategy to target genes involved in the mite nervous system or muscles. These are the same systems affected by existing miticides, but RNAi would provide greater specificity.

A pest like no other

Varroa is the latest in a long line of invasive pests to reach Australia. But its impact is unusually far-reaching, touching agriculture, ecosystems and food supply.

The situation is already serious. Beekeepers are facing rising costs for miticides (which may or may not work) and hive losses, and treatment options are narrowing.

Yet there is also a window of opportunity, and Australia can still take proactive steps to manage Varroa effectively. Norroa and similar emerging RNAi treatments are not yet available for use in Australia and would need to receive approval from the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA).

Investment in research, including next-generation tools like RNAi, will be critical. So, too, will coordinated management strategies, monitoring and support for beekeepers adapting to this new reality.

Provided by The Conversation

29/07/2026

As temperatures continue to rise, it's easy to assume honey bees can't cope. But these remarkable insects have evolved sophisticated ways to survive extreme heat.
Honey bees naturally cool their hives through evaporative cooling and bearding, working together to keep the colony at the right temperature. In my own experience managing colonies in temperatures exceeding 40°C, healthy, well-nourished colonies continued to thrive without unusual losses.
That doesn't mean climate change isn't a threat. The real challenge isn't simply hotter weather—it's the loss of habitat, reduced forage, pesticide exposure and increasing environmental pressures.
Honey bees have survived for around 37 million years by adapting to changing climates. Our role in bee conservation isn't to replace those natural adaptations, but to protect and restore the habitats that allow bees and other pollinators to flourish.
🌼 Plant more flowers.
🌳 Restore habitats.
🐝 Protect pollinators.
Healthy ecosystems create healthy bees—and that's where real conservation begins.

Insects in study fared better in cold when given a probiotic and prebiotic mix alongside their usual sugar diet

20/07/2026

The push to standardize ESG scores could make corporate greenwashing easier, not harder

Three-quarters of S&P 500 companies now tie a portion of their CEO's pay to environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics. They typically include carbon emissions, workforce diversity and worker safety, among others.

The justification is straightforward: if shareholders want corporations to take climate change and social responsibility seriously, firms should pay their leaders for achievements on these dimensions. This practice is encouraged by boards and large institutional investors.

Regulators are now trying to standardize the underlying metrics so investors can compare firms on a common basis. The European Union has gone the furthest by directly regulating ESG rating providers.

In 2024, the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board released its sustainability disclosure standards aligned with two global standards issued in 2023 by the International Sustainability Standards Board. Around 40 jurisdictions have now adopted those standards or taken formal steps toward doing so.

Why the push for standardization?

One persistent problem concerns how ESG performance should be measured in the first place. Today, major rating providers—including MSCI, Sustainalytics, S&P Global and Bloomberg—rate the same firms very differently, even when assessing the same dimension of performance.

One influential paper found that the average correlation between major ESG ratings is around 0.54—far below the near-perfect agreement between credit rating agencies. The same firm can look like a sustainability leader under one provider's score and a laggard under another's.

This divergence is widely seen as a problem, and the standard prescription is harmonization. The conventional view is that convergence on a common standard is unambiguously desirable. But is that really the case?

In a recent paper, my co-researcher, Nicolas Sahuguet and I set out to answer a simple question: If executives understand how the metrics tied to their pay are calculated, how will they actually respond? The answer points to an unintended consequence of the push for harmonization.

When targets get gamed

Critics, including law professor Lucian Bebchuk at Harvard University and economist Alex Edmans at London Business School, have argued that tying executive compensation to specific ESG metrics invites executives to game the scheme and may end up exacerbating the agency problem of executive pay.

An executive who knows exactly how a carbon-intensity score is calculated does not need to actually reduce their firm's environmental impact to improve that score. They can outsource emissions-heavy production to external suppliers or shift the firm's activities toward those that improve relevant metrics without changing its underlying environmental impact.

None of this requires fraud—only an understanding of how the scoring system works.

What our research shows

To examine this, we built a formal model of the relationship between a manager and a socially responsible board. The model accounts for the manager's ability to anticipate how their decisions will affect their own ESG-based pay, and to game the incentive scheme accordingly.

The picture that emerges is more nuanced than the debate usually allows. ESG-linked pay can be second-best optimal, but it is never without cost.

Because our model showed that the manager games whatever metric is used, ESG bonuses inevitably distort their decisions, diverting resources toward investments that improve the score rather than the underlying outcome.

The board accepts this distortion only when the alternative is worse—that is, when it genuinely wants the firm to do more for the environment or for stakeholders than what would maximize its stock price.

If shareholders already reward social performance through the stock price, as they increasingly do, equity-based pay is already providing adequate incentives. Adding ESG bonuses on top is then counterproductive on two fronts: it distorts investment decisions through gaming and pushes the firm to over-allocate resources to ESG activities beyond what either shareholders or the board actually want.

This helps explain why the sensitivity of CEO pay to ESG metrics is usually small, even in firms that have made serious public commitments to environmental or social goals. That is not necessarily window dressing. Boards keep this sensitivity low precisely to limit the distortion from gaming.

Why disagreement has value

Our model also generated a less obvious finding: the current patchwork of competing rating methodologies may actually be doing useful work. When several raters use different methodologies, gaming becomes harder because what improves one score may not improve another.

An executive who knows that Provider A weights one set of indicators, Provider B weights different ones and Provider C weights different ones still cannot easily satisfy all three without genuinely improving underlying performance.

A single official measure, by contrast, gives every CEO a clear target to optimize against. Once the methodology is public and predictable, the gap between hitting the metric and improving actual performance widens.

For harmonization to be a net improvement, the unified standard would need to be of substantially higher quality than the patchwork it replaces by a factor that scales with the number of providers being consolidated.

The central premise driving the harmonization push—that disagreement among raters is a flaw to be regulated away—deserves more scrutiny than it has received. That is a high bar.

Disagreement among raters has costs, but it also has benefits. By limiting a manager's ability to game the metrics, multiple independent measures allow firms to provide more effective incentives across ESG dimensions. Regulators should consider preserving the discipline that comes from keeping those measures independent.

29/06/2026

A new white paper from eight major EU-funded pollinator projects warns that the resilience of Europe's vital societal functions and food security are at stake if the EU fails to halt and reverse wild pollinator declines and support managed pollinators. Behind the report is an interdisciplinary team of 135 leading researchers with expertise ranging from ecosystem ecology, pollinator ecology, ecological economics, social science, environmental history, behavioral psychology, political science and environmental law.

The report flags the EU's siloed governance structures and resulting policy incoherence as the major barrier to pollinator restoration. It states that the EU and its member states urgently need to act by making pollinator stewardship an explicit and measurable top priority across policies on agriculture, environment, chemicals, research and innovation, trade, finance, planning, legislation and education.

The report diagnoses the looming pollinator crisis as arising from a dysfunctional relationship between humans and nature. Seeing humans as separate from and superior to nature, and thinking of nature as an object for human use as a resource, reinforces institutional structures that exploit nature for short-term individual and material gain. This leads to unsustainable agricultural practices that risk jeopardizing the resilience of the ecosystems on which humanity critically depends.

There is more at stake than food security, the report warns. Indeed, many of Europe's economic supply chains and sectors depend on pollination of flowering plants. Think of medicinal plants, food supplements, biomass energy crops, biomaterials, textiles, fodder, cosmetics, decoration, art, culture and tourism.

The report also highlights the low pollinator literacy of key societal actors whose daily actions can make a difference for pollinators. It advocates mandating ecoliteracy in the education of professionals in all key sectors that affect pollinators and their habitats.

According to the report's lead author, Professor Jeroen van der Sluijs, many people whose actions affect pollinators and their habitat are already doing their best to help save the bees. But most lack the literacy to understand how their practices cascade into pollinator loss. "Many farmers plant wildflower strips along their fields, but almost no one knows that some moths are more effective pollinators than honeybees. These little creatures of the night, clothed in velvet and moonlit dust, need host plants for their larvae, not only flowers. Host plants for pollinating hoverflies, beetles and moths are missing in most seed mixtures for flower strips."

Avoiding a scenario in which Europe is hit by a pollination crisis requires addressing the EU's functioning and moving away from its siloed governance structures. This requires addressing fragmented responsibilities across sectors, top-down policy design and weak coordination among administrations that currently hinders effective pollinator restoration. According to the authors, the conflict between short-term production goals and the need to maintain pollination services as a public good must be solved as soon as possible.

The report ends with a detailed roadmap of 15 urgent, evidence-informed recommendations for action that, when fully implemented, can reverse pollinator decline in Europe.

More information
Jeroen P. van der Sluijs et al, Towards pollinator stewardship in all policies: Policy incoherence in the EU is a major barrier to pollinator restoration, Zenodo (2026). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20715669.

23/06/2026

The European Commission has presented a new legislative package. It is intended to reform key provisions that have hitherto governed the approval of pesticides. The "Food and Feed Safety simplification package" is part of a comprehensive strategy through which the Commission aims to simplify legislation in the European Union (EU) and reduce the administrative burden.

In an article published in the Policy Forum section of Science, scientists from 27 European research institutions are highlighting the risks posed by the new regulations. The group of authors, led by Dr. Dimitry Wintermantel of the University of Freiburg and Dr. Julia Osterman of the University of Gothenburg, point out that the planned reform would weaken key safeguards in the approval process.

In their article, the researchers set out recommendations on how the EU could reduce the harmful effects of pesticides in the long term while at the same time streamlining the approval process.

"The simplification package would largely do away with the periodic reassessment of active substances in pesticides and leave existing weaknesses in premarket risk assessment unaddressed," says Wintermantel.

"This increases the risks posed by pesticides to biodiversity and human health. We believe that the package thus clearly undermines the precautionary principle and runs counter to European and international environmental protection objectives."

Reassessment of active substances

At present, active substances in pesticides are generally approved at the EU level for 10 years. After this period, manufacturers can apply for renewal of approval and must submit data on the safety of the active substance. This is then subject to a fresh risk assessment.

The authors highlight that, under the simplification package, most active substances would be approved indefinitely and the requirement for periodic reassessment would be removed. The problem here is that, once approval has been granted, there is neither systematic monitoring to identify pesticide risks nor a mechanism that would automatically trigger a review. Furthermore, this would result in a reversal of the burden of proof from the manufacturer to the authorities.

"In practice, periodic reassessment has proved to be an important tool. Since 2011, 59 active substances have not been granted new authorization due to health or environmental concerns," says Wintermantel.

Incorporation of scientific findings

While the EU is responsible for the approval of active substances in pesticides, individual pesticide products are authorized at the national level by the member states. According to the authors, the simplification package would result in scientific evidence being taken into account to a lesser extent when authorizing such products.

To date, EU member states have been required to take the current state of scientific knowledge into account. Although the package would not formally abolish this requirement, it would redefine it: In the future, the state of knowledge at the time of the most recent EU active substance assessment would be deemed decisive, which—in the case of indefinite approval—could date back a long time.

Transitional periods for active substances whose approval has expired

If an active substance in a pesticide is not reapproved, products containing it may, under the current regulations, continue to be used for up to 18 months. The simplification package extends this transitional period to up to three years—even if the active substance has lost its approval due to health or environmental concerns, provided these are not classified as immediate and serious.

"Contrary to the simplification proposal's aim of promoting innovation, the proposal actually carries the risk of undermining incentives for innovation," says Osterman. "If older products remain on the market for longer and are no longer subject to periodic reassessment, the pressure to develop safer and more innovative alternatives is reduced."

Recommendations for reform to promote environmental protection and efficiency

According to the authors, the current backlog in reapproval applications, caused by delayed assessments, could be cleared within three years through an annual investment of 15 million euros.

Furthermore, in order to speed up assessments and ensure high standards of protection, applicants should not be allowed to choose which member state assesses their pesticides. Instead, the EU should allocate this task on the basis of expertise. The EU must standardize assessment criteria and clearly place the burden of proof on pesticide manufacturers.

Additionally, regulatory studies should be made publicly available to enable independent research. To identify potential risks following authorization, application data should be linked to existing monitoring programs—for example, those relating to pollinators. Farmers are already collecting such application data.

Furthermore, pesticide residues in the environment should be measured more extensively. Joint analysis of these data would identify pesticides with high-risk potential and enable targeted follow-up investigations.

The authors conclude that these measures would make the approval of pesticides more scientifically sound, transparent and efficient, without undermining the precautionary principle or European environmental protection objectives.

Publication details

Dimitry Wintermantel et al, EU Omnibus proposal increases pesticide risks, Science (2026). DOI: 10.1126/science.aeg8744

Journal information: Science