Most species of bee are capable of delivering a defensive sting which is often painful. A solitary lifestyle is the ancestral state of bees and most extant species are solitary, but information on bee venoms comes predominantly from studies on eusocial species. In this study we investigated the veno...
Complex organisms are composed of organs and tissues which evolved to their present state as they function together to improve an organism's overall reproductive fitness. Studies of individual organs help us understand their basic functions but this reductionist approach misses the larger context of...
The common Eastern bumble bee Bombus impatiens is native to North America and is the main commercially reared pollinator in the Americas. There has been extensive research on this species related to its social biology, applied pollination, and genetics. The genome of this species was previously sequ...
We describe the first comprehensive venom profile of a solitary bee, the European carpenter bee Xylocopa violacea, by using a combined proteo-transcriptomic approach. Transcripts of the venom system are used as specific database to match peptide sequences from mass spectrometry analyses of venom fro...
