#workerbees

THATS ALL PROMO HOURS FOR ME ITS NUTS

Got to do this custom honey comb wrist cuff for a lovely new client recently

🐝❤️🐝

Thank you for your trust and for choosing me to do this project for you, I am always stoked to do ultra wrappy pieces like this, they are quite satisfying 😊

Flowers help increase bumblebee families survival

New research led by the UK’s Centre for Ecology & Hydrology have discovered the key to enhancing the survival of bumblebee families: flower-rich habitats. 

In the UK, most bumblebee colonies live for less than a year; nests are formed in the spring by a single queen and produce up to a few hundred daughter workers. At the end of the summer, new queens are produced which, after mating and hibernation, go on to start new colonies the following spring. Understanding survival between these critical lifecycle stages has proved challenging because in the wild, colonies are almost impossible to find.

The new research overcame these challenges by matching daughter queens to their mothers and sisters using advanced molecular genetics, and estimating the locations of colonies in the landscape from the locations of their workers.

The results provide strong support for environmentally-friendly management of farmland to provide more flowers in hedgerows, meadows and along the edges of arable fields. They also help farmers and land managers decide where best to plant flowers in the landscape.

Read more

Paper reference: Claire Carvell, Andrew F.G. Bourke, Stephanie Dreier, Stephen N. Freeman, Sarah Hulmes, William C. Jordan, John W. Redhead, Seirian Sumner, Jinliang Wang & Matthew S. Heard, ‘Bumblebee family lineage survival is enhanced in high quality landscapes’ Nature, published online 1800 GMT/1400 US Eastern Time, 15 March 2017. DOI: 10.1038/nature21709.