Insecticides used on turf are sometimes applied to areas with flowering weeds that attract honey bees and native pollinators. We tested residual effects of such treatments on colony vitality and behavior of the bumble bees Bombus impatiens Cresson foraging on turf containingwhite clover, Trifolium repens L. Imidacloprid, a syst emic chloronicotinyl used for preventive control of root-feeding gr...

In recent years, honeybees (Apis mellifera) have been strangely disappearing from their hives, and strong colonies have suddenly become weak and died. The precise aetiology underlying the disappearance of the bees remains a mystery. However, during the same period, Nosema ceranae, a microsporidium of the Asian bee Apis cerana, seems to have colonized A. mellifera, and it's now frequently detect...

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BACKGROUND Thiamethoxam, clothianidin, and imidacloprid are the most commonly used neonicotinoid insecticides on the Canadian prairies. There is widespread contamination of nectar and pollen with neonicotinoids, at concentrations which are sublethal for honey bees (Apis mellifera Linnaeus). OBJECTIVE We compared the effects of chronic, sublethal exposure to the three most commonly used neonic...

Fear can have strong ecosystem effects by giving predators a role disproportionate to their actual kill rates. In bees, fear is shown through foragers avoiding dangerous food sites, thereby reducing the fitness of pollinated plants. However, it remains unclear how fear affects pollinators in a complex natural scenario involving multiple predator species and different patch qualities. We studied...

Pollen, the primary dietary source of proteins, lipids, vitamins, and minerals, is essential to the physiological development of adult honey bees (Apis mellifera L.). A varied pollen diet is vital to immune system maintenance, organ development, and colony succession via brood production. The reasons for the recent decline in honey bee populations are wide-ranging but include a lack of diverse ...

In Giant Honey Bees, abdomen flipping happens in a variety of contexts. It can be either synchronous or cascaded, such as in the collective defense traits of shimmering and rearing-up, or it can happen as single-agent behavior. Abdomen flipping is also involved in flickering behavior, which occurs regularly under quiescent colony state displaying singular or collective traits, with stochastic, ...

Queen health is crucial to colony survival of social bees. Recently, queen failure has been proposed to be a major driver of managed honey bee colony losses, yet few data exist concerning effects of environmental stressors on queens. Here we demonstrate for the first time that exposure to field-realistic concentrations of neonicotinoid pesticides during development can severely affect queens of...

This work proposes an improved artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm, called the rank-based ABC algorithm, which includes a rank-based selection mechanism in the onlooker bees phase and a modified abandonment mechanism in the scout bees phase for solving unconstrained and constrained optimization problems. In the onlooker bees phase, the probability that an onlooker bee selects a food source is...

protein (pollen) and energy resources (honey) in a stock. Beside the pollen and the brood, it is the honey that attracts not only robbers like man, other mammals (e.g. bears and badgers) and other insects (e.g. wasps) but also bees of their own species. That is why honeybees developed their typical guarding behaviour (Butler and Free, 1952; Moore et al., 1987). Their ability to produce endother...