Precocene II, Anti-Juvenile Hormone, Honey Bee, Apis mellifera, Anti-Feedant The effect of precocene II on development of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, was studied in vitro. Oneto two-day-old worker larvae (body weight 0.5 — 1.0 mg) were removed from the colonies, reared on royal jelly-yeast extract, and after 24 h were topically applied with different amounts (5 75 |ig/larva) of precocene II....

Ants, like honeybees, can set their travel direction along foraging routes using just the surrounding visual panorama. This ability gives us a way to explore how visual scenes are perceived. By training wood ants to follow a path in an artificial scene and then examining their path within transformed scenes, we identify several perceptual operations that contribute to the ants' choice of direct...

Systemic pesticides, including the widely used neonicotinoids, have been linked to colony losses in honeybees and declines in other pollinator species. More recently, evidence has accumulated suggesting that their widespread, often prophylactic use is harming important parts of soil and water ecosystems, putting biodiversity and ecosystem services at risk. Michael Gross reports. Systemic pestic...

A key issue for theories of perception is specifying the primitives used by the visual system to isolate and identify the objects in an image. Although local features are typically suggested, there is good reason to look for global, configural features as primitives too. Chen et al.'s specific proposal of topological features is both explicit and capable of capturing important global informatio...

Honeybees have small brains, but their behavioural repertoire is impressive. In this article we focus on the extent to which adaptive behaviour in honeybees exceeds elementary forms of learning. We use the concept of modularity of cognitive functions to characterize levels of complexity in the honeybee brain. We show that behavioural complexity in the honeybee cannot be explained by independent...

INTRODUCTION This study aimed to investigate the occurrence of Africanized honeybees in Botucatu, São Paulo, Brazil, and to implement a program to remove such swarms. METHODS The occurrences of Africanized honeybee swarms between 2010 and 2012 were studied and strategies to prevent accidents were developed. RESULTS We noted 1,164 cases of Africanized honeybee occurrences in the city, and 42...

Conditioned inhibition or CI training (A+/AB-) was compared with S- training (A+/B-) in three experiments on proboscis-extension conditioning in harnessed honeybees. The purpose was to test the Rescorla-Wagner assumption, widely credited in the vertebrate literature, that a nonreinforced stimulus acquires inhibitory properties in proportion to the excitatory value of the context in which it is ...

We studied whether honeybees can distinguish face-like configurations by using standardized stimuli commonly employed in primate and human visual research. Furthermore, we studied whether, irrespective of their capacity to distinguish between face-like stimuli, bees learn to classify visual stimuli built up of the same elements in face-like versus non-face-like categories. We showed that bees s...

A honeybee informs her nestmates of the location of a flower she has visited by a unique behavior called a "waggle dance." On a vertical comb, the direction of the waggle run relative to gravity indicates the direction to the food source relative to the sun in the field, and the duration of the waggle run indicates the distance to the food source. To determine the detailed biological features o...

Many species learn the sun's daily pattern of azimuthal movement (the solar ephemeris function) for use in sun-compass orientation. In honeybees, this learning is accomplished with much innate guidance and yields stubborn, imprinting-like retention of certain aspects of the stored information. One such case involves the failure of transplanted bees to update their memories of the relationship b...