Successful honey bee foragers communicate where they have found a good resource with the waggle dance, a symbolic language that encodes a distance and direction. Both of these components are repeated several times (1 to > 100) within the same dance. Additionally, both these components vary within a dance. Here we discuss some causes and consequences of intra-dance and inter-dance angular variat...

Two microsporidia species have been shown to infect Apis mellifera, Nosema apis and Nosema ceranae. This work presents evidence that N. ceranae infection significantly suppresses the honey bee immune response, although this effect was not observed following infection with N. apis. Immune suppression would also increase susceptibility to other bee pathogens and senescence. Despite the importance...

Honey bee, Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae), colonies infested by parasitic mites are more prone to suffer from a variety of stresses, including cold temperature. We evaluated the overwintering ability of candidate breeder lines of Russian honey bees, most of which are resistant to both Varroa destructor Anderson & Trueman and Acarapis woodi (Rennie), during 1999-2001. Our results indica...

Honey has been used since ancient times as part of traditional medicine. Several aspects of this use indicate that it also has functions such as antibacterial, antioxidant, antitumor, anti-inflammatory, antibrowning, and antiviral based on the components. Biological activities of honey, and other bee products (propolis, bee bread and royal jelly are mainly attributed to the phenolic compounds s...

Understanding the diversity and consequences of viruses present in honey bees is critical for maintaining pollinator health and managing the spread of disease. The viral landscape of honey bees (Apis mellifera) has changed dramatically since the emergence of the parasitic mite Varroa destructor, which increased the spread of virulent variants of viruses such as deformed wing virus. Previous gen...

In this paper, a new approach based on the Honey bee mating optimization (HBMO) technique is proposed to tune the parameters of the multi-machine power system stabilizers (PSSs). The honey-bee mating process has been considered as a typical swarm-based approach to optimization, in which the search algorithm is inspired by the process of real honey-bee mating. The PSSs parameters tuning problem ...

Humans have an ancient and intimate relationship with honey bees--from the development of beekeeping in prehistoric times up to the recent sequencing of the honey bee genome. Yet, the intimacies of bee sexuality remained obscure and contentious until relatively recently. Their stepwise unravelling is a tale of advances and misconception that, in part, may have stemmed from an all too humanised ...

  Honey is a by-product of flower nectar and the upper aero-digestive tract of the honey bee, which is concentrated through a dehydration process inside the bee hive. Honey has a very complex chemical composition that varies depending on the botanical source. It has been used both as food and medicine since ancient times. Human use of honey is traced to some 8000 years ago as depicted by Stone ...

The basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factors play important roles in a wide range of developmental processes in higher organisms. bHLH family members have been identified in a dozen of organisms including fruit fly, mouse and human. In this study, we identified 51 bHLH sequences in silico in the honey bee, Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae), genome. Phylogenetic analyses reveale...

The impact of pesticides on honey bees is an issue that has been studied for many years and is now being reconsidered because controversy still exists with the relationship of insecticides and Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). It is insufficient to explain CCD with only bee pathology studies. Research must be conducted on a wider series of causes: i) in open field and agroecosystems, to understan...