A long-standing controversy in bee social evolution concerns whether highly eusocial behavior has evolved once or twice within the corbiculate Apidae. Corbiculate bees include the highly eusocial honey bees and stingless bees, the primitively eusocial bumble bees, and the predominantly solitary or communal orchid bees. Here we use a model-based approach to reconstruct the evolutionary history o...

Nosema ceranae infection is ubiquitous in western honey bees, Apis mellifera, in the United States and the pathogen has apparently replaced Nosema apis in colonies nationwide. Displacement of N. apis suggests that N. ceranae has competitive advantages but N. ceranae was significantly less infective and less virulent than N. apis in commercially available lineages of honey bees in studies conduc...

To investigate the possible consequences of brood-temperature regulation in honey bee colonies on the quality of behavioral performance of adults, we placed honey bee pupae in incubators and allowed them to develop at temperatures held constant at 32°C, 34.5°C, and 36°C. This temperature range occurs naturally within hives. On emergence, the young adult bees were marked and introduced into fost...

Do orchid bees sting? Female orchid bees, like the rest of the aculate Hymenoptera, have a sting apparatus, which evolved from modified ovipositor structures. Although quite painful, people rarely get stung by orchid bees, mainly because orchid bees are solitary and do not aggressively defend their nests. Also, most researchers work with stingless males, which can be easily lured to synthetic c...

grooming behaviour is one of the important mechanisms of honeybee defence against parasitic mites. in addition to genetical characteristics, environmental conditions affect the behavioural traits of honeybee colonies. the main objective of this study was to examine the effect of temperature and humidity on the ability of honeybee workers to remove varroa mites from their body. one hundred worke...

The insect growth regulators (IGRs) are ecdysone or juvenile hormone mimics, or chitin synthesis inhibitors. They are more likely to be hazardous to larval insects than to adults. Application of JH mimics to adult honey bees may affect foraging behaviour and some physiological traits. Topical and feeding tests revealed that application of IGRs to larvae may result in death and larval ejection b...

Bees play a fundamental role in the ecological balance of ecosystems, due to pollination process they carry out on crops, including production honey. However, mortality bees is significant concern; bee can occur for several reasons, such as pesticides, mites, viruses, climate change, pathogens and reduction food resources nests. The honey (Apis mellifera) most widely used commercial production....

The Bees Algorithm is a search procedure inspired by the way honey-bees forage for food. A standard mechanical design problem, the design of a welded beam structure, was used to benchmark the Bees Algorithm against other optimisation techniques. The paper presents the results obtained showing the robust performance of the Bees Algorithm.

Previous studies of magnetoreception in honey bees, Apis mellifera, focused on the identification of magnetic material, its formation, the location of the receptor and potential underlying sensory mechanisms, but never directly linked magnetic material to a magnetoreceptive function. In our study, we demonstrate that ferromagnetic material consistent with magnetite plays an integral role in the...

In many social insects, including honey bees, worker energy reserve levels are correlated with task performance in the colony. Honey bee nest workers have abundant stored lipid and protein while foragers are depleted of these reserves; this depletion precedes the shift from nest work to foraging. The first objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that lipid depletion has a causal effe...