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...

There are about 40 species of native bees in New Zealand, all belonging to the two most primitive bee families. Seven species have been introduced and established, five of which belong to the most advanced family of bees. All bees exploit similar resources such as nest sites, pollen, and nectar, so the question arises as to whether native and introduced bees are competing for these resources. S...

Asian honey bees provide fascinating insights into the evolution of honey bee foraging communication. Although all honey bees use the waggle dance to communicate resource location, variations in the waggle dance and in the biology of Asian species have led to several different hypotheses about how and why this famous behavior evolved. In this review, my goal is to suggest areas of research and ...

In this study, different context-dependent effects of imidacloprid exposure on the honey bee response were studied. Honey bees were exposed to different concentrations of imidacloprid during a time period of 40 days. Next to these variables, a laboratory-field comparison was conducted. The influence of the chronic exposure on gene expression levels was determined using an in-house developed mic...

T here is widespread concern about the global decline in pollinators and the associated loss of pollination services. This concern is understandable given the importance of pollinators for global food security; ~75% of all globally important crops depend to some degree on pollination, and the additional yield due to pollination adds ~9% to the global crop production (1). These services are deli...

Thecarpenterbee,Xylocopavirginica(L.), acts as aprimarynectar thief in southeastern plantations of native rabbiteye blueberry, Vaccinium ashei Reade, perforating corollae laterally to imbibe nectar. Honey bees, Apis mellifera L., learn to collect nectar from these perforations and thus become secondary thieves. We conducted a 2-yr study to assess how nectar robbing in honey bees affects fruit p...

Transgenic Cry1Ac + CpTI cotton (CCRI41) is increasingly planted throughout China. However, negative effects of this cultivar on the honey bee Apis mellifera L., the most important pollinator for cultivated ecosystem, remained poorly investigated. The objective of our study was to evaluate the potential side effects of transgenic Cry1Ac + CpTI pollen from cotton on young adult honey bees A. mel...

Nosema ceranae is a new and emerging microsporidian parasite of European honey bees, Apis mellifera, that has been implicated in colony losses worldwide. RNA interference (RNAi), a posttranscriptional gene silencing mechanism, has emerged as a potent and specific strategy for controlling infections of parasites and pathogens in honey bees. While previous studies have focused on the silencing of...

Marriage in honey bees optimization (MBO) is a metaheuristic optimization algorithm developed by inspiration of the mating and fertilization process of honey bees and is a kind of swarm intelligence optimizations. In this study we propose improved marriage in honey bees optimization (IMBO) by adding Levy flight algorithm for queen mating flight and neighboring for worker drone improving. The IM...

Modelling the behavior of social insects has attracted much research recently. Although honey–bees exhibit many features that encourage their use as models for intelligent behavior, up to our knowledge, no attempt for using honey-bees as a basis for optimization has been made in the literature. Some of the features that distinguish honey–bees are division of labor, communication on the individu...