While in school, every child learns the basic parts of a flower and how insects, such as bees, buzz from flower to flower, ...

You might not think of figs as nature’s most amazing creation, but you need only look inside to start to understand their awesome complexity. The fruit is actually an inward-blooming flower, or rather ...

If you love figs, you may have heard some unsettling lore about them: that every fig hides a wasp, because these insects need to crawl inside and die in order for the fruit to grow. But are there ...

(Beyond Pesticides, March 1, 2017) The Fig wasp is the pollinator of the month for March. A highly evolved pollinator crucial to the life cycle of the fig tree, the fig wasp is part of the chalcidoid ...

Depicted here are some of the many varieties of figs that do not have the specialized pollination needs of Smyrna figs, so can be grown over a much wider range. From left, top row, are Celeste, San ...

The fig wasp pollination mutualism is a quintessential example of an obligate ecological interaction, wherein minute pollinator wasps and their Ficus hosts engage in an intricate and enduring ...

Fig-pollinating wasps have provided model systems for developing and testing theories of the evolution of mutualism, sex allocation, and precision of adaptation. With few exceptions, previous studies ...

Figs and the wasps that pollinate them present one of biologists' favorite examples of a beneficial relationship between two different species. In exchange for the pollination service provided by the ...

The story of the fig and the wasp goes back as many years as man has grown fig trees, because fig wasps are the only pollinators for several species of fig trees. It is said that they co-evolved. This ...

Researchers have been studying the effect of rising temperatures on the lifespan of pollinating fig wasps. The findings show that the wasps lived much shorter lives at high temperatures, which would ...

You might not know this, but most figs have dead wasps in them at some point. That’s right. Wasps. And if that surprises you, then hold onto your hat: Scientists have found out how another species of ...