A memo from the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced on Thursday that the Trump administration rolled back an Obama-era ban on neonicotinoids, a group of synthetic chemical pesticides that are linked to the decline of wild bee populations around the world. This ends a policy that had prohibited farmers on refugees from planting genetically engineered crops. The chemicals have been … More WHAT ARE NEONICOTINOIDS? TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ROLLS BACK BAN ON SYNTHETIC CHEMICAL PESTICIDES

REUTERS/PETER BADERBY CHRISTINA PROCOPIOU   Pollinators are under threat—and that means that one in three bites of food that we eat is at risk. Additionally, this threat places the almost 90 percent of flowering plants needing pollination across the world on shaky ground, potentially endangering the wildlife that depend on them for food. According to a report sponsored by … More Forty percent of invertebrate pollinators like bees and butterflies are facing extinction, according to a UN report released February 26

A beetle that tricks bees into carrying it into their nests where it can live off their pollen, nectar and eggs adapts its deceptions to local hosts, according to research by Leslie Saul-Gershenz, a graduate student in entomology at UC Davis. Aggregations of the larvae of Meloe franciscanus beetles lure male digger bees (genus Habropoda) with … More Beetle adapts chemical mimicry to parasitize different bee species