Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are increasingly in demand as pollinators for various key agricultural food crops, but globally honey bee populations are in decline, and honey bee colony failure rates have increased. This scenario highlights a need to understand the conditions in which colonies flourish and in which colonies fail. To aid this investigation we present a compartment model of bee popu...

BACKGROUND Honeybees (Apis mellifera) exhibit an extraordinarily tuned division of labor that depends on age polyethism. This adjustment is generally associated with the fact that individuals of different ages display different response thresholds to given stimuli, which determine specific behaviors. For instance, the sucrose-response threshold (SRT) which largely depends on genetic factors may...

A novel beehive monitoring sensor with two faces is described. This attached to the outside of a hive, near hive entrance. The outward-looking 24-GHz continuous-wave Doppler radar for bee flying activity. inward-looking piezoelectric transducer. Unlike conventional microphone that would pick up sounds bees make, transducer picks incidental vibrations transmitted by activity structure. root-mean...

Some 60 years ago, many biologists thought that bees and other insects were totally color-blind animals. I was unable to believe it. For the bright colors of flowers can be understood only as an adaptation to color-sensitive visitors. This was the beginning of experiments on the color sense of the bee (I). On a table outdoors I placed a colored paper between papers of different shades of gray a...

Some 60 years ago, many biologists thought that bees and other insects were totally color-blind animals. I was unable to believe it. For the bright colors of flowers can be understood only as an adaptation to color-sensitive visitors. This was the beginning of experiments on the color sense of the bee (I). On a table outdoors I placed a colored paper between papers of different shades of gray a...

Apis mellifera bees execute waggle dances to recruit other bees to desirable food sources. Several components of the waggle dance are correlated with the direction of and the distance to food. Moreover, recruits use the spatial information encoded in the dance to locate the signalled food. However, although dance communication has been studied extensively, little is known about how the dancers ...

BigBench is the new standard (TPCx-BB) for benchmarking and testing Big Data systems. The TPCx-BB specification describes several business use cases —queries— which require a broad combination of data extraction techniques including SQL, Map/Reduce (M/R), user code (UDF), and Machine Learning to fulfill them. However, currently, there is no widespread knowledge of the different resource require...

Deformed wing virus (DWV) is a honeybee pathogen whose presence is generally associated with infestation of the colony by the mite Varroa destructor, leading to the onset of infections responsible for the collapse of the bee colony. DWV contaminates bee products such as royal jelly, bee-bread and honey stored within the infected hive. Outside the hive, DWV has been found in pollen loads collect...

Exploration is an elementary and fundamental form of learning about the structure of the world [1-3]. Little is known about what exactly is learned when an animal seeks to become familiar with the environment. Navigating animals explore the environment for safe return to an important place (e.g., a nest site) and to travel between places [4]. Flying central-place foragers like honeybees (Apis m...