X-rays have now been used to document how wild bees construct their nests in the ground. | Image: Alamy Stock

Wild bees are important not just for pollination. When they build nests in the soil, they also provide aeration and drainage, and help loosen it up. These particular contributions to the ecosystem are usually invisible, but researchers at Agroscope, the Swiss centre of excellence for agricultural research, have been creating images of them. They used X-rays to document how the bees construct individual nests, thereby revealing a variety of structures, some of which remained intact over all the 16 months of the project’s observation period.

P. Tschanz et al.: Morphology and temporal evolution of ground-nesting bee burrows created by solitary and social species quantified through X-ray imaging. Geoderma (2023)