The spread of African honey bees in South and Central America is one of the most remarkable and certainly among the most highly publicized instances of biological invasion. Their aggressive nest defense has led to numerous stinging incidents and even deaths; aggressiveness, coupled with a tendency to abandon the nest when disturbed, has also caused serious disruption of beekeeping and pollinati...

We investigate the interplay of odor identity and concentration coding in the antennal lobe (AL) of the honeybee Apis mellifera. In this primary olfactory center of the honeybee brain, odors are encoded by the spatio-temporal response patterns of olfactory glomeruli. With rising odor concentration, further glomerular responses are recruited into the patterns, which affects distances between the...

In this paper I investigate the scientific understanding of the honeybee dance language. I elucidate the implicit and explicit reasons why the honeybees’ communication system has been referred to as a ‘language’, and examine the ways this designation has entangled the themes of animal mind and human– animal continuity. I end with an investigation of a scientific controversy surrounding the hone...

The high cGMP sensitivity of cAMP-dependent protein kinase A (type II) (PKAII) from invertebrates led to the hypothesis that cGMP directly activates PKAII under physiological conditions. We tested this idea using PKAII holoenzyme purified from the honeybee brain in an assay with short stimulation times. In the presence of very low cAMP concentrations, we found a synergistic increase in PKAII ac...

patient was treated with combined topical antibiotics and steroids. At 2 weeks’ follow-up, he was asymptomatic and the eyelid swelling and corneal epithelial defect had resolved. The stinger of a honeybee normally comprises 2 lancets wrapped together by a single stylet (Figure 2A). Slight pressure was experimentally applied to a fresh stinger by rubbing the stinger between 2 fingers. This cause...

In the honeybee, Apis mellifera, vitellogenin (Vg) expression has been detected in the ovary of queens, but not in that of workers. In addition, larvae of both sexes produce Vg in significant amounts, which suggest that Vg serves for functions additional to oocyte growth and energy supply to the embryo. In vivo hormone treatment experiments suggest that the decrease of 20-hydroxyecdysone concen...

The cAMP-dependent kinase (PKA) plays a crucial part in long-term memory formation in the honeybee (Apis mellifera). One of the putative substrates of the PKA activity is the cAMP response element binding protein (CREB), a transcription factor in the bZIP protein family. We searched the honeybee genome to characterize genes from the CREB/CREM and the PKA families. We identified two genes that e...

Objectives: Royal jelly (RJ), a secretion of both the hypopharyngeal and mandibular glands of nurse workers, is believed to play a central role in honeybee queen development. Important component of royal jelly are proteins which form about 50% of the dry mass of RJ. Major royal jelly proteins (MRJPs) are the dominant proteinaceous component of royal jelly and constitute about 82-90% of total pr...

Homozygosity of Sex Determination Locus and It’s Correlation with Population Honey Production Honeybee (Apis Mellifera Meda) Populations in West-Azerbaijan Kurdistan Provinces

gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA)-gated chloride channel receptors are abundant in the CNS, where their physiological role is to mediate fast inhibitory neurotransmission. In insects, this inhibitory transmission plays a crucial role in olfactory information processing. In an effort to understand the nature and properties of the ionotropic receptors involved in these processes in the honeybee Apis...