The honeybee Apis mellifera is one of the most recognized and revered insect species throughout human history. The economic impact of the honeybee as an essential pollinator of key crops is estimated to be in the range of billions of dollars per year. The honeybee also serves as a powerful animal model for studies of the evolution and regulation of social behaviors at the endocrine, cellular, g...

The insulin signaling pathway has been hypothesized to play a key role in regulation of worker social insect behavior. We tested whether insulin treatment has direct effects on worker honeybee behavior in two contexts, sucrose response thresholds in winter bees and the progression to foraging by summer nurse bees. Treatment of winter worker bees with bovine insulin, used as a proxy for honeybee...

Sacbrood virus (SBV) and Deformed wing virus (DWV) are evolutionarily related positive-strand RNA viruses, members of the Iflavirus group. They both infect the honeybee Apis mellifera but have strikingly different levels of virulence when transmitted orally. Honeybee larvae orally infected with SBV usually accumulate high levels of the virus, which halts larval development and causes insect dea...

Honeybees have the ability to flexibly change their preference for a visual pattern according to the context in which a discrimination task is carried out. This study investigated the effect of time of day, task, as well as both parameters simultaneously, as contextual cue(s) in modulating bees' preference for a visual pattern. We carried out three series of experiments to investigate these int...

Differentiation of Iranian Honeybees (Apis mellifera meda) from Commercial Honeybee Subspecies using ND1 and ND5 Genes

polymerase chain reaction and restriction fragment length polymorphism (pcr-rflp) and phylogenetic analysis were used for molecular identification of lactic acid bacteria (labs) isolated from apis mellifera. eighteen honeybee workers were collected from three different apiaries in west azerbaijan. labs from the gut of honeybees were isolated and cultured using routine biochemical procedures. ge...

The neurological complications of bee venom poisoning vary from optic neuritis to pontine hematoma. However, to our best knowledge, trigeminal neuropathic pain secondary to bee sting has not been reported previously in the literature. We report the case of a 52-year-old male patient with right-sided trigeminal neuropathic pain that began a month earlier, following a honeybee sting to the right ...

An increased occurrence of disease at various members of the honeybee brood (queen-bee, workers, and drones) settled in the beehive, become evident recently. It is already known that various factors, primary ecological, determine disease development. The aim of the study was to discover which diseases at apiaries corresponds to similar ecological conditions at different beehive types. Effects o...

Snake or honeybee envenomation can cause substantial morbidity and mortality, and it has been proposed that the activation of mast cells by snake or insect venoms can contribute to these effects. We show, in contrast, that mast cells can significantly reduce snake-venom-induced pathology in mice, at least in part by releasing carboxypeptidase A and possibly other proteases, which can degrade ve...

A patient presented with coagulation problems a few days after honeybee sting. The purpuric skin changes developed on the legs and buttocks. She manifested signs of hypotension with disturbance of consciousness. Allergen-specific IgE serum levels against honey bee venom antigens reached >17.5 kU/l. The platelet count was 33,000/ml . The prothrombin index decreased to 28%, prothrombine time was ...