In East Africa, honey bees (Apis mellifera) provide critical pollination services and income for small-holder farmers and rural families. While honey bee populations in North America and Europe are in decline, little is known about the status of honey bee populations in Africa. We initiated a nationwide survey encompassing 24 locations across Kenya in 2010 to evaluate the numbers and sizes of h...

In beekeeping, queen honey bees are often temporarily kept alive in cages. We determined the survival of newly-emerged virgin honey bee queens every day for seven days in an experiment that simultaneously investigated three factors: queen cage type (wooden three-hole or plastic), attendant workers (present or absent) and food type (sugar candy, honey, or both). Ten queens were tested in each of...

Biological, historical and archaeological evidence proves that honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) have been present in the British Isles for at least 4000 years, and suggests that they probably entered from southern Europe after the retreat of the last Ice Age. Recent studies show that rather than having been destroyed by disease in the early 20th century, or obliterated by imports of other strains...

One of the best indicators of colony health for the European honey bee (Apis mellifera) is its performance in the production of honey. Recent research into the microbial communities naturally populating the bee gut raise the question as to whether there is a correlation between microbial community structure and colony productivity. In this work, we used 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing to explore t...

Eusocial honey bee populations (Apis mellifera) employ an age stratification organization of egg, larvae, pupae, hive bees and foraging bees. Understanding the recent decline in honey bee colonies hinges on understanding the factors that impact each of these different age castes. We first perform an analysis of steady state bee populations given mortality rates within each bee caste and find th...

Honey bee colonies in the United States have suffered from an increased rate of die-off in recent years, stemming from a complex set of interacting stresses that remain poorly described. While we have some understanding of the physiological stress responses in the honey bee, our molecular understanding of honey bee cellular stress responses is incomplete. Thus, we sought to identify and began f...

Damping of low frequency electromechanical oscillations is very important for a safe system operation. The fast acting, of a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) which is capable of improving both steady state and dynamic performance permits newer approaches to system stabilization. This paper presents a novel methodology for tuning STATCOM based damping controller in order to enhance the d...

Article history: Received 3 November 2010 Received in revised form 19 May 2011 Accepted 15 June 2011 Available online 13 July 2011

BACKGROUND The honey bee, Apis mellifera, is frequently used as a sentinel to monitor environmental pollution. In parallel, general weakening and unprecedented colony losses have been reported in Europe and the USA, and many factors are suspected to play a central role in these problems, including infection by pathogens, nutritional stress and pesticide poisoning. Honey bee, honey and pollen sa...

A new population-based search algorithm called the Bees Algorithm (BA) is presented in this paper. The algorithm mimics the food foraging behavior of swarms of honey bees. This algorithm performs a kind of neighborhood search combined with random search and can be used for both combinatorial optimization and functional optimization and with good numerical optimization results. ABC is a meta-heu...