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"Worker honeybees Behavior."
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Bee dance
\"A honeybee searches for nectar, then returns to the hive to tell the other bees. She does a waggle dance, moving in a special figure-eight pattern to share the location of the foodsource with her hivemates. With vivid and active images, Rick Chrustowski brings these amazing bees to life!\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Covert deformed wing virus infections have long-term deleterious effects on honeybee foraging and survival
Several studies have suggested that covert stressors can contribute to bee colony declines. Here we provide a novel case study and show using radiofrequency identification tracking technology that covert deformed wing virus (DWV) infections in adult honeybee workers seriously impact long-term foraging and survival under natural foraging conditions. In particular, our experiments show that adult workers injected with low doses of DWV experienced increased mortality rates, that DWV caused workers to start foraging at a premature age, and that the virus reduced the workers' total activity span as foragers. Altogether, these results demonstrate that covert DWV infections have strongly deleterious effects on honeybee foraging and survival. These results are consistent with previous studies that suggested DWV to be an important contributor to the ongoing bee declines in Europe and the USA. Overall, our study underlines the strong impact that covert pathogen infections can have on individual and group-level performance in bees.
Journal Article
Heart of the hive : inside the mind of the honey bee and the incredible life force of the colony
\"Readers will be awestruck by the hive as superorganism and how the individual bee lives and behaves within it, perfectly suited to each specific job it performs. From their intricate dances and information-rich pheromones to how they sense and respond to their environment, learn, and remember, this immersive journey into the world of bees offers an entirely new perspective on the wisdom of nature and our relationship to it.\"--Amazon.
BOOK
Mite bombs or robber lures? The roles of drifting and robbing in Varroa destructor transmission from collapsing honey bee colonies to their neighbors
When honey bee colonies collapse from high infestations of Varroa mites, neighboring colonies often experience surges in their mite populations. Collapsing colonies, often called \"mite bombs\", seem to pass their mites to neighboring colonies. This can happen by mite-infested workers from the collapsing colonies drifting into the neighboring colonies, or by mite-free workers from the neighboring colonies robbing out the collapsing colonies, or both. To study inter-colony mite transmission, we positioned six nearly mite-free colonies of black-colored bees around a cluster of three mite-laden colonies of yellow-colored bees. We then monitored the movement of bees between the black-bee and yellow-bee colonies before, during, and after mite-induced collapse of the yellow-bee colonies. Throughout the experiment, we monitored each colony's mite level. We found that large numbers of mites spread to the black-bee colonies (in both nearby and distant hives) when the yellow-bee colonies collapsed from high mite infestations and became targets of robbing by the black-bee colonies. We conclude that \"robber lures\" is a better term than \"mite bombs\" for describing colonies that are succumbing to high mite loads and are exuding mites to neighboring colonies.
Journal Article
Physiological and Behavioral Changes in Honey Bees (Apis mellifera) Induced by Nosema ceranae Infection
Persistent exposure to mite pests, poor nutrition, pesticides, and pathogens threaten honey bee survival. In healthy colonies, the interaction of the yolk precursor protein, vitellogenin (Vg), and endocrine factor, juvenile hormone (JH), functions as a pacemaker driving the sequence of behaviors that workers perform throughout their lives. Young bees perform nursing duties within the hive and have high Vg and low JH; as older bees transition to foraging, this trend reverses. Pathogens and parasites can alter this regulatory network. For example, infection with the microsporidian, Nosema apis, has been shown to advance behavioral maturation in workers. We investigated the effects of infection with a recent honey bee pathogen on physiological factors underlying the division of labor in workers. Bees infected with N. ceranae were nearly twice as likely to engage in precocious foraging and lived 9 days less, on average, compared to controls. We also show that Vg transcript was low, while JH titer spiked, in infected nurse-aged bees in cages. This pattern of expression is atypical and the reverse of what would be expected for healthy, non-infected bees. Disruption of the basic underpinnings of temporal polyethism due to infection may be a contributing factor to recent high colony mortality, as workers may lose flexibility in their response to colony demands.
Journal Article
Cryptic “royal” subfamilies in honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies
During emergency queen rearing, worker honey bees (Apis mellifera) select several otherwise worker-destined larvae to instead rear as candidates to replace their dead or failing queen. This choice is crucial as the queen is the sole reproductive in the colony and her quality is essential to its success. Because honey bee queens mate with and store sperm from multiple drones, emergency queen selection presents workers with an opportunity to increase fitness by selecting full- (0.75 relatedness), rather than half- (0.25 relatedness), sisters as new queen candidates. Through patriline analysis of colonies along with large numbers of emergency queens reared by each we affirm the purported \"royal\" patriline theory that, instead of competing nepotistically, workers exhibit bias towards selecting individuals from particular \"royal\" subfamilies during emergency queen rearing events, Further, we show that these \"royal\" patrilines are cryptic in honey bee colonies; occurring in such low frequency in the overall colony population that they are frequently undetected in traditional tests of queen mating number and colony composition. The identification of these cryptic \"royal\" subfamilies reveals that honey bee queens, already considered \"hyperpolyandrous,\" are mating with even more males than has been previously recognized. These results alter our understanding of reproductive behavior in honey bees, raising questions about the evolutionary implications of this phenomenon.
Journal Article
Division of labor in honeybees: form, function, and proximate mechanisms
Honeybees exhibit two patterns of organization of work. In the spring and summer, division of labor is used to maximize growth rate and resource accumulation, while during the winter, worker survivorship through the poor season is paramount, and bees become generalists. This work proposes new organismal and proximate level conceptual models for these phenomena. The first half of the paper presents a push-pull model for temporal polyethism. Members of the nursing caste are proposed to be pushed from their caste by the development of workers behind them in the temporal caste sequence, while middle-aged bees are pulled from their caste via interactions with the caste ahead of them. The model is, hence, an amalgamation of previous models, in particular, the social inhibition and foraging for work models. The second half of the paper presents a model for the proximate basis of temporal polyethism. Temporal castes exhibit specialized physiology and switch caste when it is adaptive at the colony level. The model proposes that caste-specific physiology is dependent on mutually reinforcing positive feedback mechanisms that lock a bee into a particular behavioral phase. Releasing mechanisms that relate colony level information are then hypothesized to disrupt particular components of the priming mechanisms to trigger endocrinological cascades that lead to the next temporal caste. Priming and releasing mechanisms for the nursing caste are mapped out that are consistent with current experimental results. Less information-rich, but plausible, mechanisms for the middle-aged and foraging castes are also presented.
Journal Article
Caste-Specific Differences in Hindgut Microbial Communities of Honey Bees (Apis mellifera)
Host-symbiont dynamics are known to influence host phenotype, but their role in social behavior has yet to be investigated. Variation in life history across honey bee (Apis mellifera) castes may influence community composition of gut symbionts, which may in turn influence caste phenotypes. We investigated the relationship between host-symbiont dynamics and social behavior by characterizing the hindgut microbiome among distinct honey bee castes: queens, males and two types of workers, nurses and foragers. Despite a shared hive environment and mouth-to-mouth food transfer among nestmates, we detected separation among gut microbiomes of queens, workers, and males. Gut microbiomes of nurses and foragers were similar to previously characterized honey bee worker microbiomes and to each other, despite differences in diet, activity, and exposure to the external environment. Queen microbiomes were enriched for bacteria that may enhance metabolic conversion of energy from food to egg production. We propose that the two types of workers, which have the highest diversity of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) of bacteria, are central to the maintenance of the colony microbiome. Foragers may introduce new strains of bacteria to the colony from the environment and transfer them to nurses, who filter and distribute them to the rest of the colony. Our results support the idea that host-symbiont dynamics influence microbiome composition and, reciprocally, host social behavior.
Journal Article
Deformed wing virus affects foraging success and foraging specialization of honeybee workers
Deformed wing virus (DWV) is a major driver of honeybee colony losses, yet its sublethal effects on adult foraging behaviour remain underexplored. Building on evidence that covert DWV infections impair sucrose responsiveness and associative learning, we tested whether infection changes foraging success and specialization in worker bees. Using a controlled experiment, we marked 1,000 newly emerged workers that were either inoculated with DWV lysate or injected with an RNA-interference control that suppressed viral replication. Foraging activity, success, and specialization were recorded. Our results show that DWV-infected bees began foraging earlier (“precocious foraging”) and had higher mortality, reducing their lifespan as foragers. Furthermore, infected nectar foragers were significantly less likely to return with nectar, and when they did, it contained markedly lower sugar concentrations compared to control bees. Conversely, infected bees were slightly more likely to return with pollen and showed greater specialization in pollen foraging, although pollen load weights were similar between treatments. These findings indicate that DWV disrupts multiple aspects of foraging ecology by accelerating behavioural maturation, shortening forager lifespan, reducing nectar yield and quality, and shifting resource preference towards pollen. Such changes may reflect a compensatory response to impaired nectar collection, but nonetheless could compromise colony nutrition, particularly when high-quality nectar is scarce. Our results align with previous work linking DWV to impaired foraging efficiency, and altered foraging specialization, and reduced honeybee survival, underscoring DWV’s substantial sublethal costs. By reducing nectar foraging while leaving pollen loads unaffected, DWV may limit honey stores and brood rearing during high demand periods, contributing to seasonal losses. Even moderate declines in nectar-foraging can undermine colony resilience, highlighting the need to address DWV’s role in the pollinator crisis.
Journal Article
Indirect exposure to insect growth disruptors affects honey bee (Apis mellifera) reproductive behaviors and ovarian protein expression
Pesticide exposure and queen loss are considered to be major causes of honey bee colony mortality, yet little is known regarding the effects of regularly encountered agrochemicals on honey bee reproduction. Here, we present the results of a two-generational study using specialized cages to expose queens to commonly used insect growth disrupting pesticides (IGDs) via their retinue of worker bees. Under IGD exposure, we tracked queen performance and worker responses to queens, then the performance of the exposed queens’ offspring was assessed to identify patterns that may contribute to the long-term health and stability of a social insect colony. The positive control, novaluron, resulted in deformed larvae hatching from eggs laid by exposed queens, and methoxyfenozide, diflubenzuron, and novaluron caused a slight decrease in daily egg laying rates, but this was not reflected in the total egg production over the course of the experiment. Curiously, eggs laid by queens exposed to pyriproxyfen exhibited increased hatching rates, and those larvae developed into worker progeny with increased responsiveness to their queens. Additionally, pyriproxyfen and novaluron exposure affected the queen ovarian protein expression, with the overwhelming majority of differentially expressed proteins coming from the pyriproxyfen exposure. We discuss these results and the potential implications for honey bee reproduction and colony health.
Journal Article