So it has been harder than it should have been to understand the honeybee.
This original Cape bee then wandered into an African-honeybee hive and began working there.
Unlike honeybee hives, colonies of Exoneura contain several fertile females sometimes as many as eight.
Honeybee numbers have fallen by 10 to 15% in the last three years.
Millions of acres of Conservation Reserve Land bloomed, supplying a healthy mix of blossoms to thousands of honeybee colonies.
Bumblebees are less studied than their honeybee cousins, but they also pollinate many commonly eaten crops, including strawberries, raspberries and runner beans.
But first, researchers are going to try to save the humble honeybee.
The rapid and total destruction the clones inflict on their hosts suggests that the phenomenon should peter out as African-honeybee hives become scarcer.
Florida was a suburb of that paradise, before the trees were sprayed night and day, turning whole counties into a honeybee no-trespassing zone.
But other native bees are gaining scientific attention at a time when honeybee hives are plagued by myriad problems that threaten their survival.
The second oddity is that in 1990, or thereabouts, a single Cape bee hatched with a handful of mutations that made her eggs smell like those of African-honeybee queens.
Dr Ma even suggested that the robots could behave like many real insects and assist with the pollination of crops, "to function as the now-struggling honeybee populations do in supporting agriculture around the world".
BBC: Robotic insect: World's smallest flying robot takes off
In the last half century, the domesticated honeybee population has declined by about 50 percent, with incidents common well before the introduction of neonics, which was hailed by environmentalists because of their comparatively modest environmental footprint.
FORBES: Science Collapse Disorder -- The Real Story Behind Neonics And Mass Bee Deaths
Out of these, only perhaps two dozen have been successfully raised by humans, and only one Apis mellifera, commonly known as the western honeybee accounts for nearly all the bees maintained by beekeepers in Europe and North America.
This is just one of the 13, 000 inventions discovered by Indian business professor Anil Gupta and his Honeybee Network, which has been scouring India since 1988, looking for ideas that are changing the lives of the rural poor.
FORBES: More Names You Need To Know in 2011: Crowd-Sourcing Forbes Magazine
Bees could, once again in theory, be treated with antiviral drugs or, alternatively, the virus might burn itself out. (A recent paper co-written by van Engelsdorp shows that unexplained honeybee die-offs have occurred in the U.S. fourteen times in the past hundred years.) Finally, there is the possibility that C.
应用推荐