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The troubled life of honeybees gets a lot of media attention, but many other pollinators are in serious trouble, according to Eric Mader, assistant pollinator program director with The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. "In some cases, their fates are potentially worse," he says. "For example, a number of our roughly 50 native bumblebee species are in precipitous decline, with a couple of species likely having gone extinct in recent years, and a few other possibly teetering on the brink of extinction. "Similarly, the once ubiquitous monarch butterfly Danaus plexippus has declined to some of the lowest population levels ever documented since scientists first began tracking their numbers in the 1970s."

One hundred and twenty three species of butterflies have been recorded in Trinidad and Tobago. According to President of the Trinidad and Tobago Wild Fowl Trust, Molly Gaskin. Butterflies are less prevalent than ever in many areas in Trinidad and Tobago and common local species like the bamboo page, yellow migrants, brown biscuit, painted lady and the black tomato are on the verge of extinction.

Honeybee colonies in the United States reduced in number by 30 percent over the 2010-2011 winter, according to a recently released annual survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA). The loss was actually lower than for the previous winter, 2009-10, which saw a 34 percent drop in honeybee populations. A 29 percent drop in 2008-9, a 36 percent loss in 2007-8, and a 32 percent decline in 2006-7 preceded the new data.

"Queen of the Sun,” the new advocacy documentary from Taggart Siegel, is a movie about bees but also about the countless ways we bend, distort and exploit nature to our ends. The documentary casts bees as the canary in the coal mine, a warning that long-term effects of mass food production could have consequences for humans as well as honeybees. Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekoeQodrVoM

Too many of beekeeper Tony Bachelder’s hives have gone silent. Once-thriving hives — averaging 70,000 honeybees each — sit idle and empty. Too often, he opens the boxes and finds nothing more than a few dead bees at the bottom. Last summer, the veteran Buckfield beekeeper had 700 healthy hives. This spring, the number has fallen to 500. And many of the remaining hives have only a fraction of their former populations.

Neonicotinoids are synthetic, nicotine-derived insecticides used for agricultural and household pest control. Though highly effective at activating insect nicotinic receptors, many neonicotinoids are also capable of directly activating and/or modulating the activation of vertebrate nicotinic receptors. In this study, we have investigated the actions of the neonicotinoids clothianidin (CTD) and imidacloprid (IMI) on human neuronal alpha4β2 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors.

The data demonstrate that the compounds are weak agonists of the human receptors with relative peak currents of 1–4% of the response to 1 mM acetylcholine (ACh). Coapplication of IMI strongly inhibited currents elicited by ACh. From Schild plot analysis, we estimate that the affinity of IMI for the human alpha4β2 receptor is 18 μM. The application of low concentrations of CTD potentiated responses to low concentrations of ACh, suggesting that receptors occupied by one ACh and one CTD molecule have a higher gating efficacy than receptors with one ACh bound. Interestingly, subunit stoichiometry affected inhibition by CTD, with alpha(4)2(β2)3 receptors significantly more strongly inhibited than the alpha(4)3(β2)2 receptors.

One of Virginia’s most valuable agricultural assets, the honeybee, continues to struggle to survive."This past year we’re probably seeing higher losses than the year before,” said Keith Tignor, state apiarist with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. “We’re still surveying, and it will be a few months before we know exact results. But informally we’re hearing of lots of bee losses.” Winter honeybee losses have averaged 31 percent over the past decade, according to statistics reported by Tignor to the Virginia Farm Bureau Emerging Agricultural Enterprises Committee on April 28.

The Slovenian government has issued a temporary ban on seeds treated with neonicotinoid pesticides following reports about massive bee deaths in northeast Slovenia. More than 10% of the bee population in Pomurje has been killed, and the scope of the incident is spreading fast. Slovenian farmers called on the government to reverse its ban on corn seeds treated with neonicotinoid pesticides due to a lack of a conclusive link between recent bee deaths and the seeds.

Amid the uproar over mysterious disappearances of honeybee colonies, concern over the plight of native bees has been confined to scientists laboring in obscurity. Robbin Thorp of the University of California, Davis, a noted bumble bee authority and an emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis has watched local native bee populations steadily decrease over the last decades. In fact, 2006 was the last time he saw a Franklin's bumble bee Bombus franklini.