One key advantage of eusociality is shared defense of the nest, brood, and stored food; nest defense plays an important role in the biology of eusocial bees. Recent studies on honey bees, Apis mellifera, have focused on the placement of defensive activity in the overall scheme of division of labor, showing that guard bees play a unique and important role in colony defense. Alarm pheromones func...

Power distribution systems typically have tie and sectionalizing switches whose states determine the topological configuration of the network. The aim of network reconfiguration of the distribution network is to minimize the losses for a load arrangement at a particular time. Thus the objective function is to minimize the losses of the network by satisfying the distribution network constraints....

The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is a swarm-based metaheuristic optimization technique, developed by inspiring foraging and dance behaviors of honey bee colonies. ABC consists of four phases named as initialization, employed bee, onlooker bee and scout bee. The employed bees try to improve their solution in employed bees phase. If an employed bee cannot improve self-solution in a certa...

Elucidating the mechanisms by which honey bees process pollen vs. protein supplements are important in the generation of artificial diets needed to sustain managed honeybees. We measured the effects of diet on protein concentration, hypopharyngeal gland development and virus titers in worker honey bees fed either pollen, a protein supplement (MegaBee), or a protein-free diet of sugar syrup. Wor...

Abstract We tested the influence of genetic variation on responses to natural and artificial diets in Varroa -resistant Pol-line Russian honey bee stocks. Newly emerged workers from six colonies per stock were fed pollen, spirulina (blue-green microalgae), sucrose-only 144 total cages. Diet type had a strong effect sugar intake, body weight, fat lipid content, vitellogenin ( vg ) expression. Sp...

Honey bees, as social insects, rely on collective behavioral defenses that produce a colony-level immune phenotype, or social immunity, which in turn impacts the immune response of individuals. One behavioral defense is the collection and deposition of antimicrobial plant resins, or propolis, in the nest. We tested the effect of a naturally constructed propolis envelope within standard beekeepi...

In order to resolve the multi-parameter optimization problem of finite impulse response (FIR) digital filter design, a quantum bee colony algorithm (QBCA) is proposed. The proposed QBCA is a multi-dimensional search algorithm for optimization of real numbers, and uses mechanisms of quantum evolution to update the positions of different quantum bees. Computer simulations have showed that FIR dig...

Flight activity was compared in colonies of Russian honey bees, Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae), and Italian bees during commercial pollination of lowbush blueberries (principally Vaccinium angustifolium Aiton) in Washington Co., ME, in late May and early June in 2003 and 2004. Colonies of the two stocks were managed equally in Louisiana during autumn through early spring preceding obse...

Understanding strategies used by animals to explore their landscape is essential to predict how they exploit patchy resources, and consequently how they are likely to respond to changes in resource distribution. Social bees provide a good model for this and, whilst there are published descriptions of their behaviour on initial learning flights close to the colony, it is still unclear how bees f...

Varroa destructor, an ectoparasitic mite of honey bees (Apis mellifera), is the most serious pest threatening the apiculture industry. In our honey bee breeding programme, two honey bee colonies showing extreme phenotypes for varroa tolerance/resistance (S88) and susceptibility (G4) were identified by natural selection from a large gene pool over a 6-year period. To investigate potential defenc...