BACKGROUND Substantial honey bee colony losses have occurred periodically in the last decades. The drivers for these losses are not fully understood. The influence of pests and pathogens are beyond dispute, but in addition, chronic exposure to sublethal concentrations of pesticides has been suggested to affect the performance of honey bee colonies. This study aims to elucidate the potential eff...

Division of labor is a striking feature observed in honey bees and many other social insects. Division of labor has been claimed to benefit fitness. In honey bees, the adult work force may be viewed as divided between non-foraging hive bees that rear brood and maintain the nest, and foragers that collect food outside the nest. Honey bee brood pheromone is a larval pheromone that serves as an ex...

This paper proposes a design of Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm based Proportional plus Integral controller using Area Requirement (AR) Criterion for the Load Frequency Control of a two area multi unit interconnected thermal reheat power system without and with Gas Turbine unit. The system was simulated and the output responses of the frequency deviations, tie-line power deviation and con...

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) optimization algorithm is a swarm intelligence based nature inspired algorithm which has been proved a competitive algorithm with some popular nature-inspired algorithms. However, it is found that the ABC algorithm prefers exploration at the cost of the exploitation. Therefore, in this paper a self adaptive fitness based mutation strategy is presented in which the pe...

The US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) employs a tiered process for assessing risks of pesticides to bees. model discussed in this paper focuses on honey bees (Apis mellifera L.). If are identified at the first tier based exposure and toxicity data individual adult larval bees, then effects evaluated higher-tier studies using bee colonies. Colony-level require large amounts resources (t...

We propose a model that combines the dynamics of the spread of disease within a bee colony with the underlying demographic dynamics of the colony to determine the ultimate fate of the colony under different scenarios. The model suggests that key factors in the survival or collapse of a honey bee colony in the face of an infection are the rate of transmission of the infection and the disease-ind...

Reports of colony collapse disorder in bees and studies showing the toxicity of neonicotinoid pesticides have led to claims that we are experiencing a pollinator crisis. As Cyrus Martin reports, however, the issue is complex with threats to bees being multifold and the status of populations unclear due to a surprising lack of data.

The paper presents a study on developing an optimum reservoir release policy by using ABC algorithm. The decision maker of a reservoir system always needs a guideline to operate the reservoir in an optimal way. Release curves have developed for high, medium and low inflow category that can answer how much water need to be release for a month by observing the reservoir level (storage condition)....

A honey bee colony has been likened to an oil company. Somemembers of the company or colony prospect for valuable liquid resources. When these are discovered other group members can be recruited to exploit the resource. The recruitment of nestmates to a specific location where there is a patch of flowers should change the economics of scouting, that is, the search for new resource patches. In p...

The superiority of Africanized over European honey bees in tropical and subtropical regions of the New World is both well documented and poorly understood. As part of an effort to try to understand the process by which the displacement of European bees occurred, we examined the ability of these two types of bees and of hybrids between the two to convert natural and artificial diets into usable ...