31–40 of 105 posts
A lot of plants aren’t pollinated by bees. There’s pollinator wasps, flies, moths, butterflies… even birds and bats are pollinators
See https://www.backyardecology.net/not-all-flower-visitors-are-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jumping spiders are smarter
Are they? They are smarter than web-spinning spiders but I've never read anything suggesting they are smarter than bees. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3357
Bees' intelligence relies on them being a hive organism.
Pretty sure I see many bees on Magnolias.
Right, the whole point of bees as insect pollinators (reflecting that they are recent evolutionary line) is that they are by a healthy margin the most intelligent arthropod. They will inspect then successfully pollinate anything floral over a wide geographic range. Most insect pollinators are instinctually tied to certain species/families.
Maybe it's the other way around: humans selected honeybees to "domesticate" because of their versatility (and of course the fact that they produced honey)?
A lot of plants aren’t pollinated by bees. There’s pollinator wasps, flies, moths, butterflies… even birds and bats are pollinators
The earliest angiosperms appeared in the Cretaceous. This is after the appearance of Hymenoptera (Jurassic) and Diptera (Triassic). While a nice story, this needs additional substantiation. An alternative explanation is likelier imo.
Bees, which feed on pollen and nectar from plant flowers, instead of catching other insects, have evolved much later from wasp-like Hymenoptera, after angiosperms were already widespread.
So the timeline fits into the story.
A lot of plants aren’t pollinated by bees. There’s pollinator wasps, flies, moths, butterflies… even birds and bats are pollinators
I have to say that if we're also talking about wild grasses, my wire fox terrier is also a pollinator. He collects an incredible amount of seeds and burrs during his walkies investigations and I have to pick them out of his fur afterwards (risky because he gets annoyed easily).
Some insects gather nectar from a flower and don't pollinate the flower. This is called nectar robbing. See https://www.backyardecology.net/not-all-flower-visitors-are-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jumping spiders are smarter
Spiders are not insects though https://www.burkemuseum.org/collections-and-research/biology...
Aristotle used the word "insects" for all terrestrial arthropods and this was followed for millennia until the last two centuries when someone preferred to use "Insecta" instead of "Hexapoda", without giving any reason for this, and others followed this taxonomy.
Even so, the exact extent of the term "insects" varies between biologists, because some do not include all wingless hexapods under "insects".
In an informal discussion, I do not see any mistake in using the word "insects" with its original meaning from Aristotle, which is also the meaning that can be encountered in a lot of old books. For unambiguous animal classification, the word "hexapods" is preferable.