Honeybees utilise floral odours when foraging for flowers; we investigated whether diesel exhaust pollution could interrupt these floral odour stimuli. A synthetic blend of eight floral chemicals, identified from oilseed rape, was exposed to diesel exhaust pollution. Within one minute of exposure the abundances of four of the chemicals were significantly lowered, with two components rendered un...

Deformed wing virus (DWV) and its vector, the mite Varroa destructor, are a major threat to the world's honeybees. Although the impact of Varroa on colony-level DWV epidemiology is evident, we have little understanding of wider DWV epidemiology and the role that Varroa has played in its global spread. A phylogeographic analysis shows that DWV is globally distributed in honeybees, having recentl...

Asian honeybees have been shown to kill hornets by ‘thermoballing’, in which they surround a hornet to form a ball within which the temperature increases to a lethal level. We report here that Cyprian honeybees, Apis mellifera cypria, kill their major enemy, the Oriental hornet, Vespa orientalis, in a different way — by asphyxiaballing, in which the Cyprian honeybees mob the hornet and smother ...

In each of 2 experiments on discriminative learning in free-flying honeybees (Apis mellifera), performance in a difficult problem was found to be facilitated by prior training in an easier problem. In Experiment 1, animals that were trained to detect a strong anomaly in the ambient geomagnetic field performed better when the intensity of the anomaly was reduced than did control animals that wer...

Polymerase chain reaction and restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) and phylogenetic analysis were used for molecular identification of lactic acid bacteria (LABs) isolated from Apis mellifera. Eighteen honeybee workers were collected from three different apiaries in West Azerbaijan. LABs from the gut of honeybees were isolated and cultured using routine biochemical procedures. Ge...

An imaging lidar instrument with the capability of measuring the frequency response of a backscattered return signal up to 3.6 kHz is demonstrated. The instrument uses a commercial microchip frequency-doubled pulsed Nd:YAG laser with a 7.2 kHz pulse repetition rate, a pulse duration of less than 1 ns, and a pulse energy of greater than 10 microJ. A 15.2 cm commercial telescope is used to collec...

The properties of visually guided flight speed and height control were investigated by training honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) to fly through a tunnel in which the visual cues in the lateral and ventral visual fields could be varied by changing the patterns on the walls and floor of the tunnel. The results show that honeybees regulate their flight speed by keeping the velocity of the image of th...

nosema apis is an obligate intracellular parasite belonging to phylum microsporidia. this para site is known as main causative agent of nosemosis in honeybees especially in the european honeybee (apis mellifera). nosemosis can cause queen supersedure, reduction of honey yield and dwindling the population of honeybees. a total number of 54 apiaries were randomly sampled from april to july 2011 a...

Apoptosis is not only pivotal for development, but also for pathogen defence in multicellular organisms. Although numerous intracellular pathogens are known to interfere with the host's apoptotic machinery to overcome this defence, its importance for host-parasite coevolution has been neglected. We conducted three inoculation experiments to investigate in the apoptotic respond during infection ...

The European honeybee, Apis mellifera, is an important pollinator of agricultural crops. Since 2006, when unexpectedly high colony losses were first reported, articles have proliferated in the popular press suggesting a range of possible causes and raising alarm over the general decline of bees. Suggested causes include pesticides, genetically modified crops, habitat fragmentation, and introduc...