Eusocial behavior is extensively studied in the honeybee, Apis mellifera, as it displays an extreme form of altruism. Honeybee workers are generally obligatory sterile in a bee colony headed by a queen, but the inhibition of ovary activation is lifted upon the absence of queen and larvae. Worker bees are then able to develop mature, viable eggs. The detailed repressive physiological mechanisms ...

In contrast to many other complex traits, the natural genetic architecture of life expectancy has not been intensely studied, particularly in non-model organisms, such as the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.). Multiple factors that determine honey bee worker lifespan have been identified and genetic analyses have been performed on some of those traits. Several of the traits are included in a suite ...

In Apis mellifera, hygienic behavior involves recognition and removal of sick, damaged or dead brood from capped cells. We investigated whether bees react in the same way to grouped versus isolated damaged capped brood cells. Three colonies of wild-type Africanized honey bees and three colonies of Carniolan honey bees were used for this investigation. Capped worker brood cells aged 12 to 14 day...

To combat an increasing abundance of sucking insect pests, >40 pesticides are currently recommended and frequently used as foliar sprays on row crops, especially cotton. Foraging honey bees may be killed when they are directly exposed to foliar sprays, or they may take contaminated pollen back to hives that maybe toxic to other adult bees and larvae. To assess acute toxicity against the honey b...

Within a particular animal taxon, larger bodied species generally have larger brains. Increased brain size usually correlates with increased behavioral repertoires and often with superior cognitive abilities. Bumblebees are eusocial insects that show pronounced size polymorphism among workers, whereas in honey bees size variation is much less pronounced. Recent studies suggest that within a giv...

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...

Bumble bees are important pollinators whose populations have declined over recent years, raising widespread concern. One conspicuous threat to bumble bees is their unintended exposure to trace residues of systemic neonicotinoid pesticides, such as imidacloprid, which are ingested when bees forage on the nectar and pollen of treated crops. However, the demographic consequences for bumble bees of...

In colonies of the honeybee Apis mellifera, the queen is usually the only reproductive female, which produces new females (queens and workers) by laying fertilized eggs. However, in one subspecies of A. mellifera, known as the Cape bee (A. m. capensis), worker bees reproduce asexually by thelytoky, an abnormal form of meiosis where two daughter nucleii fuse to form single diploid eggs, which de...