 Why bees? Most people only think of the honeybee when they allow their thoughts to turn to bees, but it turns out that there are nearly 20,000 known (and many more unknown) species of bees. Bees are a crucial part of our ecosystem and understanding their behavior and their needs will help us to conserve them. Without bees, much of our food production and natural vegetation will collapse due to loss of pollination. Bees are an essential part of our environment and deserve to be understood and defended. Some of this work based upon a CURE performed before NSF support was recently published in the Journal of the Arizona Nevada Academy of Science  |