Bee venom has recently been suggested to possess beneficial effects in the treatment of Parkinson disease (PD). For instance, it has been observed that bilateral acupoint stimulation of lower hind limbs with bee venom was protective in the acute 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) mouse model of PD. In particular, a specific component of bee venom, apamin, has previously been sh...

Wild bees provide important pollination services to agroecoystems, but the mechanisms which underlie their contribution to ecosystem functioning--and, therefore, their importance in maintaining and enhancing these services-remain unclear. We evaluated several mechanisms through which wild bees contribute to crop productivity, the stability of pollinator visitation, and the efficiency of individ...

In order to solve problems of optimization, Swarm Intelligence (SI) algorithms are extensively becoming more popular. Many swarm intelligence based optimization techniques are present but most face problems like convergence problem and local minimization problem. In this paper, a hybrid optimization algorithm is proposed using fractional order Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) and Genetic Algorithm (...

Alfalfa (=lucerne) flowers require visiting bees to trip the sexual column, thereby providing pollination and subsequent pod and seed set. Previous studies have compared the pollination values of different bee species solely by the speed with which they handle flowers and the proportion of visited flowers tripped. In this greenhouse study, five species of bees, including the three commercially ...

Inexpensive and non-intrusive marking methods are essential to track natural behavior of insects for biological experiments. An inexpensive, easy to construct, and easy to install bee marking device is described in this paper. The device is mounted at the entrance of a standard honey bee Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae) hive and is fitted with a removable tube that dispenses a powdered m...

Bee venom has long been used as a traditional folk medicine in Korea. It has been reportedly used for the treatment of arthritis, cancer, and inflammation. Although its anti-inflammatory activity in lipopolysaccharide- (LPS-) stimulated inflammatory cells has been reported, the exact mechanism of its anti-inflammatory action has not been fully elucidated. Therefore, the aim of this study was to...

Inspired by the intelligent foraging behavior of honey bees, the artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC), a swarm-based stochastic optimization method, has shown to be very effective and efficient for solving optimization problems. However, since its solution search equation is good at exploration but poor at exploitation, ABC often suffers from a slow convergence speed. To better balance the tra...

BACKGROUND Double sensitization (DS) to bee and vespid venom is frequently observed in the diagnosis of hymenoptera venom allergy, but clinically relevant DS is rare. Therefore it is sophisticated to choose the relevant venom for specific immunotherapy and overtreatment with both venoms may occur. We aimed to compare currently available routine diagnostic tests as well as experimental tests to ...

The folded intersegmental membrane is a structure that interconnects two adjacent abdominal segments; this structure is distributed in the segments of the honey bee abdomen. The morphology of the folded intersegmental membrane has already been documented. However, the ultrastructure of the intersegmental membrane and its assistive role in the telescopic movements of the honey bee abdomen are po...

Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) Algorithm is an optimization algorithm used to find out the global optima. In ABC, each bee stores the information of feasible solution or candidate solution and stochastically modifies this over time, based on the information provided by neighboring bees, it speculative modifies over time and based on the best solution found by the bee itself. . In this proposed wor...