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 ...

Plants existed on Earth for hundreds of millions of years before the first flowers bloomed. But when flowering plants did evolve, more than 140 million years ago, they were a huge evolutionary success ...

A wide range of plant species rely on insects for pollination, but the diversity of these insect-pollinated plants have decreased dramatically in recent decades Wild flowers are essential to bees and ...

Take a closer look at a flower on a sunny day, and you are likely to see bees buzzing, butterflies fluttering or tiny beetles quietly moving across its petals. While these visits may seem ordinary, ...

Get a honeybee near a rose or a lavender and the insect will extend its strawlike tongue to search for nectar, pollinating the flower in the process. That’s at least how it works in clean environments ...

Insects play an important role in the world’s food production. Roughly 70 percent of all crop species, including apples, strawberries and cocoa, depend on them for pollination. Insects rely on a ...

Many plants and crops rely on insects to pollinate them so they can reproduce. A new study has shown that several flowering plants from the group Euonymus are pollinated by fungus gnats, a dipteran ...

About 90% of flowering plants rely on animals to transfer their pollen and optimise reproduction, making pollination one of nature’s most important processes. Bees are usually the first insects to ...

Newswise — For centuries scientists have observed that when a visiting insect's tongue touches the nectar-producing parts of certain flowers, the pollen-containing stamen snaps forward. The new study ...