Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are key pollinators, playing a vital role in ecosystem maintenance and stability of crop yields. Recently, reduced honey bee survival has attracted intensive attention. Among all other honey bee stresses, temperature is a fundamental ecological factor that has been shown to affect honey bee survival. Yet, the impact of low temperature stress during capped brood on br...

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 ...

acute bee paralysis virus (abpv) is a small single stranded rna virus recently classified within the family dicistroviridae, genus cripavirus. here, we describe the first study of abpv in unhealthy bee colonies, which has been an unusual loss in adult bee population and significant honey bee mortality during the year. the aim of this study was evaluation of abpv infection in honey bee colonies ...

Antioxidant enzymes perform a variety of vital functions including the reduction of life-shortening oxidative damage. We used the honey bee genome sequence to identify the major components of the honey bee antioxidant system. A comparative analysis of honey bee with Drosophila melanogaster and Anopheles gambiae shows that although the basic components of the antioxidant system are conserved, th...

Internet centers host services for e-banks, e-auctions and other clients. Hosting centers then must allocate servers among clients to maximize revenue. The limited number of servers, costs of reallocat-ing servers, and unpredictability of requests make server allocation optimization difficult. Based on the many similarities between server and honey bee colony forager allocation, we propose a ne...

Honey-bee colony losses are an increasing problem in Western countries. There are many different causes, including infections due to various pathogens. Molecular biology techniques have been developed to reliably detect and identify honey-bee pathogens. The most sensitive, specific and reliable is the quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) methodology. This review of the litera...

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...

among the viruses infecting honey bees, chronic bee paralysis virus (cbpv) is known to induce significant losses in honey bee colonies. cbpv is an unclassified polymorphic single stranded rna virus. using rt-pcr, the virus infections in honey bees can be detected in a rapid and accurate manner. bee samples were collected from 23 provinces of iran, between july-september 2011 and 2012. a total o...

Evidence of inter-species pathogen transmission from managed to wild bees has sparked concern that emerging diseases could be causing or exacerbating wild bee declines. While some pathogens, like RNA viruses, have been found in pollen and wild bees, the threat these viruses pose to wild bees is largely unknown. Here, we tested 169 bees, representing 4 families and 8 genera, for five common hone...

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are prominent crop pollinators and are, thus, important for effective food production. The honey bee gut microbiota is mainly host specific, with only a few species being shared with other insects. It currently remains unclear how environmental/dietary conditions affect the microbiota within a honey bee population over time. Therefore, the aim of the present study wa...