Varroa destructor is one of the most common parasites of honey bee colonies and is considered as a possible co-factor for honey bee decline. At the same time, the use of pesticides in intensive agriculture is still the most effective method of pest control. There is limited information about the effects of pesticide exposure on parasitized honey bees. Larval ingestion of certain pesticides coul...

...................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................ vii LIST OF FIGURES ................

BACKGROUND Honeybee stings can cause toxic and allergic reactions that may lead to severe symptoms, and sometimes to death. Mexico is the third worldës honey country exporter and sixth producer. Due to the arrival of Africanized bees into Mexico in 1986, the National Program for Control of Africanized Bee (NPCAB) was created, in order to reduce the socioeconomic and sanitary impact from the new...

Honey bees are important pollinators of agricultural crops. Pathogens and other factors have been implicated in high annual losses of honey bee colonies in North America and some European countries. To further investigate the relationship between multiple factors, including pathogen prevalence and abundance and colony health, we monitored commercially managed migratory honey bee colonies involv...

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is a Nature Inspired Algorithm (NIA) which based on intelligent food foraging behaviour of honey bee swarm. This paper introduces a local search strategy that enhances exploration competence of ABC and avoids the problem of stagnation. The proposed strategy introduces two new local search phases in original ABC. One just after onlooker bee phase and one aft...

Bee species interactions can benefit plant pollination through synergistic effects and complementary effects, or can be of detriment to plant pollination through competition effects by reducing visitation by effective pollinators. Since specific bee interactions influence the foraging performance of bees on flowers, they also act as drivers to regulate the assemblage of flower visitors. We sele...

Say the word “insect” and what comes to mind? I asked that question to nonentomology, first-year undergraduate students on the first day of class. The typical response: “Insects suck.” I suspect they were thinking of the suffering inflicted by mosquitoes and other bloodfeeding insects, crop damage caused by their vegetarian counterparts, and the invasion of human dwellings by cockroaches and te...

The genetic algorithms (GAs) are the evolutionary learning process, which are applied to complex optimization problems to find the optimum results from other results. The GAs to achieve the proper results in the iteration process selects the fitter solutions from a solution space. In this process, the parent selections, crossover and mutation operations have the important roles to find the opti...

Shimanuki, Hachiro, and David A. Knox. 2000. Diagnosis of Honey Bee Diseases. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Handbook No. AH– 690, 61 pp. Apiary inspectors and beekeepers must be able to recognize bee diseases and parasites and to differentiate the serious diseases from the less important ones. This handbook describes laboratory techniques used to diagnose diseases and other abnorm...