Tallgrass prairies have been reduced to less than 5% of their former range, yet provide essential habitats for many native plants and animals such as pollinators. Land managers work to preserve the biodiversity within these tallgrass prairies by implementing management techniques such as burning, haying, and patch-burn-grazing (PBG). All treatments utilize burning, but haying removes abovegroun...

To obtain the best food source, bees communicate their forage information by waggle dance, which indicates direction, distance, and quality of the food source they found. In this paper we propose a multi-function routing algorithm (BMFR) inspired by bees' foraging behaviors for network-on-chip (NoC). We utilize a bee agent model to exchange the states among nodes. According to these states we e...

1. Declines in abundance and diversity of bumble bees ( Bombus spp.) in Europe have been linked to agricultural intensification and the resulting loss of suitable foraging and nesting habitats. Environmental Stewardship (ES) is a new scheme in England offering the opportunity to restore habitats of value for these important pollinators to agricultural land. Scientific evaluation of the options ...

1. Combining the needs of agricultural production with enhancing biodiversity requires a landscape-scale approach since the geographic scale at which most non-farmed species operate is unconstrained by farm boundaries. Bumblebees are a key component of farmland biodiversity as pollinators of both crops and wild flora. However, the factors determining their densities in such landscapes remain po...

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are increasingly in demand as pollinators for various key agricultural food crops, but globally honey bee populations are in decline, and honey bee colony failure rates have increased. This scenario highlights a need to understand the conditions in which colonies flourish and in which colonies fail. To aid this investigation we present a compartment model of bee popu...

Experimental and Natural Variation in Hovering Flight Capacity in Bees, Hymenoptera: Apidae By Jason Thomas Vance Dr. Stephen Roberts, Examination Committee Chair Associate Professor of Biological Sciences University of Nevada, Las Vegas In honey bees, the capacity for flight underlies many behaviors which impact fitness and longevity, such as the ability to forage or evade predators. However, ...

Pest management practices may be contributing to a decline in wild bee populations in or near canola (Brassica napus L.) agroecosystems. The objective of this study was to investigate the direct contact toxicity of five technical grade insecticides--imidacloprid, clothianidin, deltamethrin, spinosad, and novaluron--currently used, or with potential for use in canola integrated pest management o...

Understanding which flowers honey bees (Apis mellifera) use for forage can help us to provide suitable plants for healthy honey bee colonies. Accordingly, honey DNA metabarcoding provides a valuable tool for investigating pollen and nectar collection. We investigated early season (April and May) floral choice by honey bees provided with a very high diversity of flowering plants within the Natio...

Organisation in eusocial insect colonies emerges from the decisions and actions of its individual members. In turn, these decisions and actions are influenced by the individual's behaviour (or temperament). Although there is variation in the behaviour of individuals within a colony, we know surprisingly little about how (or indeed if) the types of behaviour present in a colony change over time....

A honey bee colony has been likened to an oil company. Somemembers of the company or colony prospect for valuable liquid resources. When these are discovered other group members can be recruited to exploit the resource. The recruitment of nestmates to a specific location where there is a patch of flowers should change the economics of scouting, that is, the search for new resource patches. In p...