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National Geographic
3 days ago
- Science
- National Geographic
A quiet island experiment reveals a battle of the bees
When beekeepers introduced honeybees to a protected island, wild bees nearly vanished. Could removing the hives reverse the damage? Domestic honeybees (Apis mellifera) help with pollinating crops worldwide, but they also compete with wild bees for nectar resources. Photograph by Ingo Arndt, Nat Geo Image Collection Since 2018, honeybees have feasted on wildflowers across a remote Italian island called Giannutri every spring. But for the last four years, Lorenzo Pasquali had the unusual task of shutting the honeybee hives down and watching wild bees as they scrambled to claim the flowers, racing for every drop of nectar in the absence of their domesticated rivals. Managed honeybees, often used in agriculture, and native bees feast on the same floral nectars and pollens. Ecologists have long suspected that honeybees may be pushing wild bees to the margins, but carrying out experiments in these wild insects has turned out to be tricky. Pasquali, an ecologist now at the University of Bialystok, Poland, and his colleagues turned the islet—just over half the size of New York's Central Park—into a living laboratory to test honeybees' impact. The results, recently published in the journal Current Biology, suggest that wild bee numbers alarmingly dropped. With the temporary removal of honeybees, nectar and pollen levels surged, allowing wild bees to forage more and feed on nectar longer and altering their daily routines. 'It is surprising and a nice experiment,' says Alfredo Valido, an entomologist at the Instituto de Productos Naturales y Agrobiología in Spain, who was not involved in the research. The researchers designed a very clear experiment relating honeybees, flowers and wild bees, he adds. (Native bees that pollinate many of our favorite foods.) A new honeybee (Apis mellifera) emerges from a brood cell to live for six short weeks. It spends that time foraging for food, making honey, and raising the next generation. Composite Photograph by Anand Varma, Nat Geo Image Collection The buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) was one of two wild species that saw a drop in numbers on Giannutri Island after honeybees were introduced. Photograph by Chris Gomersall, 2020VISION/Nature Picture Library Beekeepers first brought honeybee queens to Giannutri to raise them in isolation. The island is part of the Tuscan Archipelago National Park, and in 2021, authorities asked Pasquali's advisor, entomologist Leonardo Dapporto of the University of Florence to investigate whether managed honeybees that were recently brought to the island might have an unexpected ecological fallout. Hiking the island with another colleague, Alessandro Cini of the University of Pisa, they noticed plenty of honeybees buzzing around, but just a few wild bees. From scuba diving to set-jetting 'What if tomorrow there are no honeybees on the island?' Dapporto wondered. 'How [would] the behavior of wild bees change?' The team decided to use the island as a natural experiment. Every other morning, Pasquali would seal off the entrances to all 18 honeybee hives on alternating mornings, making sure the honeybees couldn't leave. Then, he and fellow researchers would observe the island's wild pollinators. The bees were kept inside until late afternoon—just long enough for researchers to observe how wild bees behaved in their absence. 'It was a unique experience. Never boring,' Pasquali says. 'I still remember every plant and rock on the island.' For Pasquali and his teammates, identifying native wild bees was easy. The wild bees are bigger and darker with bright colors. The wild bees also fly with a distinct buzzing sound compared to the honeybees. The researchers tracked how often wild bees entered or exited plots of land, tracking how often they visited flowers, and how long they spent drinking nectar. Using delicate tubes, they also measured the volume of nectar available for the wild bees in presence or absence of honeybees. The team found that when honeybees were locked in their hives, nectar volume increased by over 50 percent in some plants, while pollen level spiked by nearly 30 percent. Subsequently, the researchers found an increased level of searching behavior in wild bees and they also sucked in nectar for a longer time. Over four years, as the team carried out surveys on the island to monitor wild bee populations, they found that Anthophora dispar, a solitary native bee species, and Bombus terrestris, a type of bumblebee, fell by nearly 80 percent compared to their population level at the start of the study in 2021. While in the beginning of the experiment researchers expected to see some impacts to the wild bees, 'we didn't imagine that the impact was this strong,' Dapporto says. The dataset is still a correlation, he adds, but the fact that the wild bee population declined so significantly after the introduction of honeybees puts them on the prime focus compared to other factors. Commercial beekeeping, like this operation on a ranch in California, is extremely important for agriculture, but honeybees may threaten native wild species when they're introduced to protected areas. Photograph by Anand Varma, Nat Geo Image Collection 'We are not against beekeeping practice,' Dapporto adds. But when honeybees are introduced into protected areas, especially those home to rare, endangered, or native wild bee species, park authorities should exercise great caution and ecological assessment. Wild bees on bigger islands and even in sensitive protected areas in mainland regions might be facing similar fates, if honeybees have been introduced without proper assessment, the team says. Wild bees face a range of threats, from habitat loss and climate change to pesticide exposure. But unlike many of these pressures, competition from honeybees is something humans can actively manage. As soon as Dapporto's team informed the national park about the results, the park immediately took action, halting the practice of beekeeping starting this year. That makes the results even more impressive, Valido says, commending the quick action. 'It's not logical to introduce [managed species] in an area where you want to preserve the flora and fauna,' he adds. In addition to beekeeping, 'sometimes conservation areas have a variety of land uses for things like pasture cattle and sheep,' says Victoria Wojcik, Science Director at the Pollinator Partnership Canada, a non-profit dedicated for the conservation of pollinators. Even in these cases, conservationists should look at the ecosystem resources to avoid overstocking. But for an area designated as a critical habitat for an invertebrate species, specifically a bee, 'I would be really confused as to why someone would consider permitting honeybee keeping in that landscape,' she adds. As for Dapporto and his team, they are continuing to track whether the native wild bees would change their behavior and bounce back in number as the honeybees are removed from the island. The team has already collected some data this year and is planning to continue observation for coming years. 'Then we could see if a longer absence of honeybees will produce a [major] effect on the behavior of wild bees,' he adds.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
This Sleazy GLP-1 Prescription Site Is Using Deepfaked "Before-and-After" Photos of Fake Patients, and Running Ads Showing AI-Generated Ozempic Boxes
In the cash grab for patients eager to get on GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic, startups are getting so sloppy that their marketing materials look like unintentional parody. Consider MEDVi, an online prescription hub for GLP-1s. The company wants you to know that it's "serious" about helping you lose weight, according to its website, which entreats visitors to join "50,000+ MEDVi patients" who have turned to the service for weight loss help. That help, it says, comes in the form of "personalized care" and "highly effective weight loss medications," which it characterizes later as "doctor-approved." At a subscription starting price of under $200 with "no insurance required," it adds, it's a "budget-friendly" semaglutide option. To drive its sales pitch home, MEDVi's website is packed with images of happy-looking, smiling people; the women in the smoothed-over pictures each wear sports bras in trendy colors, while the grinning men are decked out in T-shirts. There's also a slew of alleged customer success stories, which the company claims are from actual MEDVi patients. "Sometimes you have to see it to believe it," reads a blurb of copy, alongside a series of bef0re-and-after weight loss photos. "GLP-1 medication can be life-changing and improves mood, sleep, energy and longevity. Photos, testimonials and results are from MEDVi patients." Except, we couldn't help but notice, none of these alleged patients are real. Each image in the smiling, sports-bra'd crowd appears to have been generated from scratch using AI — and the before-and-after photos, more insidiously, are eerily convincing deepfakes, seemingly generated by lifting existing images of real people from across the web and using AI to alter their faces. MEDVi's site represents layers of sophisticated trickery that, while previously much more difficult, have been made incredibly accessible through easy-to-use text and image generators and deepfake tools. As profiteers race to flood the web with disorienting AI-powered content, including around buzzy products like GLP-1 meds, the eternal advice to not believe everything you read — and now, everything you see — online is now more urgent than ever. We first came across MEDVi in a deeply mangled digital advertisement found at the foot of a local news article showcasing a clearly AI-generated image of a box of Ozempic. To say nothing of the fact that the image used looks absolutely nothing like a real box of Ozempic, the AI-drawn box is covered with AI artifacts like twisted, gibberish letters, and includes a legume-like logo bearing no resemblance to the real logo used by Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk, which features an Apis bull. "Solution fo [sic] injection," reads one prominent piece of text on the ersatz box, while another claims that the package contains a "solutån [sic] for injection in pre-filled pen." "O)zenpic," reads a garbled and incorrectly-spelled Ozempic logo on the side of the box. Intrigued by the blatancy of the ad's AI slop even in the heavily scrutinized world of pharmaceuticals, we decided to explore further. Upon clicking the link, we were greeted by the website's first round of AI-generated people — who, though almost convincing, bear signs of AI-generation, like oddly-smooth curls and ears that blend mysteriously into the side of their head. Just underneath these images, MEDVi includes a rotating list of logos belonging to websites and news publishers, ranging from health hubs like Healthline to reputable publications like The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Forbes, among others — suggesting that MEDVi is reputable enough to have been covered by mainstream publications. Forbes, we found, did include MEDVi in a roundup of "Best Weight Loss Injections Of 2025," where it earned a "very good" rating of "9.4." The article appeared in Forbes Health, and includes a disclaimer noting that the page's content was "created independently from the Forbes Health Editorial team." But otherwise, there was no sign of MEDVi coverage in the New York Times, Bloomberg, or the other outlets it mentioned. The only other remotely mainstream news coverage we could find of the company was in an US Weekly article from earlier this month, titled "6 Affordable GLP-1 Solutions After the FDA Bans Generic Medications" that also circulated on Yahoo. (Both the Forbes Health and US Weekly articles were affiliate content, meaning they were created outside of normal editorial channels, and the outlets earn money when readers click the links on the page.) Perhaps nothing about MEDVi's site, though, is as egregious as its alleged patient before-and-after images. Under text telling possible customers that the "results speak for themselves," MEDVi features side-by-side pictures of three purported patients: "Sandra K," "Michael P," and "Melissa C." Contrasted with the stock photo-esque images featured elsewhere on the page, these images looked much less uncanny. Their bodies had more distinct, lifelike details, and objects and lettering seen in the background looked genuine. And when we dug through web searches to see if the images existed elsewhere, we realized that's because the photos of dramatic weight loss were indeed real. At least, from the neck down. What appears to have happened is that the sloperators behind MEDVi took images that had already been floating around the web for years, and used AI-powered deepfake tech to convincingly alter their faces. Take the side-by-side images of "Michael P," who MEDVi claims lost 48 pounds over just five months. We were able to find the original image in a Daily Mail article from 2018 — before semaglutide was even approved for weight loss purposes — that featured before-and-after photos of people who quit drinking, which was itself based on an undated Bored Panda article of "Before & After Pics That Show What Happens When You Stop Drinking." Per Bored Panda and the Daily Mail, the man in the original picture is a Redditor who posts fitness and sobriety content under the username u/iDoneDo. The Daily Mail article timestamps the Redditor's weight loss journey as occurring between 2016 and 2017, which we confirmed by finding u/iDoneDo's original Reddit post. That ages the image to long before the GLP-1 craze kicked off — and before AI started to fill the web with synthetic and deepfaked content. Web searches for the other alleged patients yielded similar results: inspirational weight-loss imagery that's drifted around the web for years, and altered to disguise the actual people in the images as fake MEDVi customers. To bolster its feigned legitimacy, MEDVi's site flaunts a lineup of doctors — full names and headshots included — that the startup claims to have partnered with. "MEDVi physicians are here to guide you every step of the way," reads the webpage, "bringing both their expertise and genuine care to keep you supported. When we searched for their names and images of these doctors, we discovered that they were, in fact, real medical professionals with LinkedIn pages, personal websites, and clear work histories. But to our surprise, these searches also returned yet another sketchy website for GLP-1 drugs. This one is called NuHuman, and offers a similar service, though it seems to be targeted specifically at the Chicago area. NuHuman's website is also crawling with AI slop, though once again features the same lineup of very real doctors. We contacted each doctor to ask if they could confirm their involvement with MEDVi and NuHuman. We heard back from one of those medical professionals at the time of publishing, an osteopathic medicine practitioner named Tzvi Doron, who insisted that he had nothing to do with either company and "[needs] to have them remove me from their sites." We also reached out to MEDVi, which didn't respond. When we tried to reach out to NuHuman with the site's listed email, the message bounced back. We did find some Reddit comments, though, warning other netizens to steer clear of MEDVi, claiming serious allegations of possible HIPPA violations, shady billing practices, and even damaged vials of seemingly bogus drugs causing physical harm. AI is making the web weirder and muddier than ever. And though MEDVi promises that "sometimes you have to see it to believe it," in our burgeoning AI-powered web, that's no longer the case. More on AI slop: Slop Farmer Boasts About How He Uses AI to Flood Social Media With Garbage to Trick Older Women
India Today
7 days ago
- Science
- India Today
Stingless bees can increase crop yields by 29%, shows Nagaland University research
In a first-of-its-kind initiative, researchers at Nagaland University have been able to demonstrate how stingless bees can boost crop output and quality through pollination -- without the stinging to the research, fruit set in king chilli increased to 29.46% from 21% with these bees as the the common chilli (Capsicum annuum), fruit development in healthy condition increased by nearly 8%, and seed weight, an indicator of enhanced germination, increased by over 60%.advertisementThe team, led by Dr Avinash Chauhan, All India Coordinated Research Project (AICRP) on Honeybees & Pollinators' Principal Investigator, discovered that the two species of stingless bees, namely Tetragonula iridipennis and Lepidotrigona arcifera, not only improved fruit production but also improved seed viability in chilli and king IS THIS RESEARCH IMPORTANT? Dr Chauhan further stated that this technique is meant to fill the gap of pollination in crops, especially where honeybee use is emphasised the need to preserve other pollinators like Apis dorsata, Apis florea, halictid and syrphid bees. Honey being extracted from stingless bees as part of a study conducted by Nagaland University advertisement"The last 7 to 10 years of research gave us strong results. We not only had more crop yields, but the honey from these bees also generated extra income," Dr Chauhan added."We're working on improving beekeeping practices and promoting awareness regarding the conservation of wild pollinators," he crops on which the research was carried out are cucumber, watermelon, citrus, tomato, brinjal, and dragon isolated and duplicated stingless bee colonies from forest areas native to them into scientific hives and then these hives were planted in open fields as well as greenhouses. ABOUT STINGLESS BEESStingless bees are widespread in the North East, South and Eastern parts of India. Scientific domestication of stingless bees has been done in Nagaland and subsequently extended to Meghalaya and Arunachal research is an important step towards sustainable agriculture and conservation of pollinators. Future research will further explore the pharmaceutical value of stingless bee honey and examine other lesser-researched crops like passion fruit and chow chow.
Time of India
19-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
World Bee Day: In the hum of bees lies the pulse of progress
1 2 3 Nagpur: Bees are quietly shaping the future of agriculture and forestry, a fact underscored by Suresh Gudhe , a retired joint director and beekeeping expert from the Khadi and Village Industries Commission, Nagpur. "Bees are indispensable for forest and agricultural development," Gudhe asserts, emphasising their role in pollination , which drives fruit and seed formation, enabling new plant growth. Without effective pollination, he warns, "Even forest departments struggle to achieve desired plant regeneration." On World Bee Day , celebrated on May 20, Gudhe, a trainer in beekeeping, highlighted the diversity of bees in India, from the robust rock bee (Apis dorsata), which yields up to 30kg of honey annually, to the delicate stingless bee (Trigona), a pollination powerhouse. Each species, whether the Indian hive bee (Apis cerana indica), little bee (Apis florea), or the foreign Apis mellifera, contributes uniquely to ecosystems. "Bees don't just produce honey," Gudhe explains, adding, "They ensure biodiversity , supporting crops and forests through pollination." The benefits of beekeeping extend beyond ecology. Gudhe points to economic opportunities, with products like honey, beeswax, pollen, royal jelly, and propolis commanding global demand. "Pollen is as vital as honey, packed with nutrients," he notes, adding that bee venom and royal jelly are used in pharmaceuticals, while propolis offers antibacterial properties. For rural communities, beekeeping is a pathway to self-reliance, supported by government schemes like PMEGP and Honey Mission, which provide training and financial aid. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like New Launch - Birla Navya on Golf Course Road Extn, Gurugram Birla Navya AVIK Click Here Undo "Beekeeping can transform lives and bolster India's economy," Gudhe says. Yet, challenges loom. Industrialisation threatens environmental balance, and Gudhe stresses the need for planting nectar-rich trees to sustain bee populations. "Conserving bees is conserving life," he urges, echoing Albert Einstein's warning that humanity's survival hinges on bees. Community-driven afforestation, involving schools, NGOs, and forest departments, is vital, but Gudhe insists on prioritising bee-friendly plants. Gudhe's call to action resonates: "Everyone must protect beehives in their surroundings." His vision blends science, tradition, and sustainability, positioning beekeeping as a cornerstone of environmental and economic progress. Through collective effort, India can harness the power of these tiny pollinators to secure a greener, more prosperous future. By embracing beekeeping, we not only safeguard nature but also empower communities, proving that in the hum of bees lies the pulse of progress.
