Social insects have many defence mechanisms against pests and pathogens. One of these is hygienic behaviour, which has been studied in detail in the honey bee, Apis mellifera Hygienic honey bee workers remove dead and diseased larvae and pupae from sealed brood cells, thereby reducing disease transfer within the colony. Stingless bees, Meliponini, also rear broods in sealed cells. We investigat...

Article history: Received 13 October 2010 Received in revised form 12 February 2012 Accepted 10 March 2012 Available online 15 May 2012

A comparison was made of the prevalence and relative quantification of deformed wing virus (DWV), Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), black queen cell virus (BQCV), Kashmir bee virus (KBV), acute bee paralysis virus (ABPV) and sac brood virus (SBV) in brood and adult honey bees (Apis mellifera) from colonies selected for high (HMP) and low (LMP) Varroa destructor mite population growth. Two v...

Hybrid Differential Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm Ajith Abraham1 ∗, Ravi Kumar Jatoth2, and A. Rajasekhar3 1Machine Intelligent Research Labs (MIR Labs), Scientific Network for Innovation and Research Excellence, USA 2Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Warangal, India 3Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, National Institu...

Eusocial honey bee populations (Apis mellifera) employ an age stratification organization of egg, larvae, pupae, hive bees and foraging bees. Understanding the recent decline in honey bee colonies hinges on understanding the factors that impact each of these different age castes. We first perform an analysis of steady state bee populations given mortality rates within each bee caste and find th...

Artificial bee colony optimization algorithm is one of the popular swarm intelligence technique anticipated by D. Karaboga in year 2005. Since its inception, this algorithm was modified by a number of researchers and applied in different areas of engineering, science and management to solve very complex problems. This algorithm is very simple to implement and has the least number of control par...

Recently, it has been proposed that the one of the main determinants of complex societies in Hymenoptera is colony size, since the existence of large colonies reduces the direct reproductive success of an average individual, given a decreased chance of being part of the reproductive caste. In this study, we evaluate colony size evolution in corbiculate bees and their relationship with the socia...

In recent years large number of algorithms based on the swarm intelligence has been proposed by various researchers. The Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is one of most popular stochastic, swarm based algorithm proposed by Karaboga in 2005 inspired from the foraging behavior of honey bees. In short span of time, ABC algorithm has gain wide popularity among researchers due to its simplicity...

Due to its excellent speed control characteristics, the DC motor has been widely used in industry even though its maintenance costs are higher than the induction motor. As a result, speed control of DC motor has attracted considerable research and several methods have evolved. PID controllers have been widely used for speed control of DC motor. In this paper the using Artificial Bees Colony (AB...

There is a trend in the scientific community to model and solve complex optimization process by employing natural metaphors. In this area, Artificial Bee Colony optimization (ABC) tries to model natural behaviour of real honeybees in food foraging. ABC algorithm is an optimization algorithm based on the intelligent behaviour of honey bee swarm. In this work, ABC is used for solving multivariabl...