Many physiological systems appear to have safety margins, with excess capacity relative to normal functional needs, but the significance of such excess capacity remains controversial. In this study, we investigate the effects of parasitic tracheal mites (Acarapis woodi) on the safety margin for oxygen delivery and flight performance of honeybees. Tracheal mites did not affect the flight metabol...

In an appetitive context, honeybees (Apis mellifera) learn to associate odors with a reward of sucrose solution. If an odor is presented immediately before the sucrose, an elemental association is formed that enables the odor to release the proboscis extension response (PER). Olfactory conditioning of PER was used to study whether, beyond elemental associations, honeybees are able to process co...

Free-flying honeybees acquire color information differently depending upon whether a target color is learnt in isolation (absolute conditioning), or in relation to a perceptually similar color (differential conditioning). Absolute conditioning allows for rapid learning, but color discrimination is coarse. Differential conditioning requires more learning trials, but enables fine discriminations....

Visual landmarks guide humans and animals including insects to a goal location. Insects, with their miniature brains, have evolved a simple strategy to find their nests or profitable food sources; they approach a goal by finding a close match between the current view and a memorised retinotopic representation of the landmark constellation around the goal. Recent implementations of such a matchi...

A study of the most important polliniferous plants for European and Africanized honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) was made in Quintana Roo state. Comparisons were made between the plants visited by both bee types in order to determine whether there were qualitative or quantitative differences in their choice of plant species. Also some foraging strategies of the honeybees were analysed. Pollen from...

Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are constantly exposed to a wide variety of environmental stressors such as parasites and pesticides. Among them, Nosema ceranae and neurotoxic insecticides might act in combination and lead to a higher honeybee mortality. We investigated the molecular response of honeybees exposed to N. ceranae, to insecticides (fipronil or imidacloprid), and to a combination of both...

We use binary odorant compounds to investigate 'blocking' in honeybees which learn to associate an odorant (A-D) with a sucrose reward as the reinforcer (+). 'Blocking' means that learning about a stimulus B is reduced when trained in compound with a stimulus A that has previously been trained alone. Thus, reinforcement of B in these circumstances is not sufficient to induce learning. Such bloc...

Insect populations are declining globally. Most crops rely on insect pollination, putting food security at risk. Honeybees important pollinators and have been used widely in public awareness campaigns. This study surveyed countries about the status of their programmes for monitoring management. Responses were received from 273 persons 108 countries. Apis mellifera was reported by nearly all Man...

1 ENFA analysis using the GUI 1.1 Preparation For the purposes of this example, honeybees data set will be used throughout Data management can be accessed through the menu Data (Figure 1).

Recent studies of visual sequence learning in honeybees have investigated the bees' ability to perform delayed-matching-to-sample and their short-term memory during such tasks. The insect's successful performance raises questions about the underlying mechanisms.