When blooms appear on our fruit trees or vegetable gardens, we happily anticipate a bountiful harvest. If the bees help by doing their pollinating job, the fruits and vegetables should begin to ...

In nature, the quest to survive and spread is essential — and that’s certainly true for flowers. We might see them as vibrant harbingers of spring or precursors to juicy tomatoes, but from the ...

Figure 1 Bumblebees use vibration to forage pollen on beaked and “nosey” Pedicularis. They always bite at the base of the flower’s beak and then buzz it. The pollen released from the beak’s terminus ...

Bees aren’t the only insects pollinating red clover. Moths do about a third of the flower visits after dark, new research suggests. The findings, detailed in the July Biology Letters, come as a ...

Using a mobile stamen to slap away insect visitors maximizes pollination and minimizes costs to flowers, a study shows. For centuries scientists have observed that when a visiting insect's tongue ...

The words “pollination” and “flower” may seem inseparable, but plants began courting insects millions of years before they ...

When everything in nature aligns as it should, plants form flowers, then bees and other pollinators drop in to grab the pollen from those flowers, and as they flit from one blossom to the next, they ...

An analysis of plant–pollinator interactions reveals that the presence of abundant plant species favours the pollination of rare species. Such asymmetric facilitation might promote the coexistence of ...