Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are of vital economic and ecological importance. These eusocial animals display temporal polyethism, which is an age-driven division of labor. Younger adult bees remain in the hive and tend to developing brood, while older adult bees forage for pollen and nectar to feed the colony. As honey bees mature, the types of pathogens they experience also change. As such, pat...

The insulin signaling pathway has been hypothesized to play a key role in regulation of worker social insect behavior. We tested whether insulin treatment has direct effects on worker honeybee behavior in two contexts, sucrose response thresholds in winter bees and the progression to foraging by summer nurse bees. Treatment of winter worker bees with bovine insulin, used as a proxy for honeybee...

This paper describes the first application of the Bees Algorithm to optimization problems. The Bees Algorithm (BA) is a search procedure inspired by the way honey bees forage for food. The paper presents the results obtained showing the robust performance of the BA. The results of comparative studies of the Bees Algorithm against other various discrete and continuous optimization algorithms for...

One of the consequences of the expansion is the health conditions of the bees in the countries where they are found today. It is known that the honey bees are susceptible to several diseases and bee pests such as EFB, AFB, Nosema, Amoeba, Sacbrood, Chalkbrood, Acarine, Varroosis, Viruses etc. The two most important diseases of honey bees are Varroosis and American Foulbrood (AFB) (DE JONG, 1994...

BACKGROUND Artificial rearing of honey bee larvae is an established method which enables to fully standardize the rearing environment and to manipulate the supplied diet to the brood. However, there are no studies which compare learning performance or neuroanatomic differences of artificially-reared (in-lab) bees in comparison with their in-hive reared counterparts. METHODS Here we tested how...

Bees Algorithm is one of the optimization algorithms inspired from the natural foraging ways of the honey bees of finding the best solution. It is an iteration algorithm; therefore, it is suffering from slow convergence. The other downside of the Bee Algorithm is that it has needless computation. This means that it spends a long time for the bees algorithm converge the optimum solution. In this...

Many ant species and some social bees display size-related polyethism, often referred to as alloethism (Wilson, 1971). For example bumblebees (Bombus spp.) exhibit alloethism; there is great size variation within the worker caste, and large bees tend to be foragers, while smaller bees tend to perform within-nest tasks (reviewed in Goulson, 2003). In contrast, honeybees workers are approximately...

1. Native, wild bees are important pollinators for both crop and wild plants. With concerns over the availability and cost of managed honeybees, attention has turned to native, wild bees as crop pollinators. However, the ability of native, wild bees to provide sufficient pollination may depend on their populations at local scales. 2. Therefore, at the farm scale, we examined the pollination con...

background: the aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of the nosema ceranae and nosema apis among apiaries using both spore counts and multiplex pcr and the replacement of n. apis by n. ceranae in some regions of turkey. methods: a hundred honey bee samples were collected from 99 apiaries in 11 different locations in 2011-2012 in turkey. nosema infection degree from collected sample...