The stinging and guarding components of the defensive behavior of European, Africanized, hybrid, and backcross honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) were compared and analyzed at both colony and individual levels. Hybrid and Africanized backcross colonies stung as many times as Africanized ones. European backcross colonies stung more than European bees but not as many times as Africanized or Africanize...

We determined whether defense by individual bees against non-nestmates in honey bees (Apis mellifera) is correlated with their juvenile hormone (JH) titers, which are known to vary developmentally and seasonally. We bioassayed winter and summer bees for aggressive and non-aggressive individuals. Bees in winter could not be distinguished by task group, but bees in summer were segregated into nur...

Bees are amazing little creatures; while some of them live solitary lifestyles, many bee species form large colonies, or hives, and function as a superorganism. Scientific interest in bees covers many different angles. Some researchers are interested in how bees learn and communicate as part of the superorganism. Others study how bees fly and recognize objects during flight— skills that have in...

Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) belongs to the class of NP-Complete problems. It has been proved that evolutionary algorithms are effective and efficient, with respect to the traditional methods for solving NP-Complete problems like TSP, with avoidance trapping in local minima areas. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is a new swarm-based optimization algorithm, which inspired by the foraging behavi...

Honey bees can form distinct spatiotemporal memories that allow them to return repeatedly to different food sources at different times of day. Although it is becoming increasingly clear that different behavioral states are associated with different profiles of brain gene expression, it is not known whether this relationship extends to states that are as dynamic and specific as those associated ...

The Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is a popular swarm based algorithm inspired by the intelligent foraging behavior of honey bees. In the past, many swarm intelligence based techniques were introduced and proved their effective performance in solving various optimization problems. The exploitation of food sources is performed by onlooker bees in accordance with a proportional selection s...

Bees Algorithm is a population-based method that is a computational bound algorithm whose inspired by the natural behavior of honey bees to finds a near-optimal solution for the search problem. Recently, many parallel swarm based algorithms have been developed for running on GPU (Graphic Processing Unit). Since nowadays developing a parallel Bee Algorithm running on the GPU becomes very importa...

BACKGROUND Honeybees (Apis mellifera) exhibit an extraordinarily tuned division of labor that depends on age polyethism. This adjustment is generally associated with the fact that individuals of different ages display different response thresholds to given stimuli, which determine specific behaviors. For instance, the sucrose-response threshold (SRT) which largely depends on genetic factors may...

We evaluated the ratio between the number of pollen foragers and the total number of bees entering colonies of Melipona bicolor, a facultative polygynous species of stingless bees. The variables considered in our analysis were: seasonality, colony size and the number of physogastric queens in each colony. The pollen forager ratios varied significantly between seasons; the ratio was higher in wi...