In this study, different context-dependent effects of imidacloprid exposure on the honey bee response were studied. Honey bees were exposed to different concentrations of imidacloprid during a time period of 40 days. Next to these variables, a laboratory-field comparison was conducted. The influence of the chronic exposure on gene expression levels was determined using an in-house developed mic...

T here is widespread concern about the global decline in pollinators and the associated loss of pollination services. This concern is understandable given the importance of pollinators for global food security; ~75% of all globally important crops depend to some degree on pollination, and the additional yield due to pollination adds ~9% to the global crop production (1). These services are deli...

Thecarpenterbee,Xylocopavirginica(L.), acts as aprimarynectar thief in southeastern plantations of native rabbiteye blueberry, Vaccinium ashei Reade, perforating corollae laterally to imbibe nectar. Honey bees, Apis mellifera L., learn to collect nectar from these perforations and thus become secondary thieves. We conducted a 2-yr study to assess how nectar robbing in honey bees affects fruit p...

Transgenic Cry1Ac + CpTI cotton (CCRI41) is increasingly planted throughout China. However, negative effects of this cultivar on the honey bee Apis mellifera L., the most important pollinator for cultivated ecosystem, remained poorly investigated. The objective of our study was to evaluate the potential side effects of transgenic Cry1Ac + CpTI pollen from cotton on young adult honey bees A. mel...

Nosema ceranae is a new and emerging microsporidian parasite of European honey bees, Apis mellifera, that has been implicated in colony losses worldwide. RNA interference (RNAi), a posttranscriptional gene silencing mechanism, has emerged as a potent and specific strategy for controlling infections of parasites and pathogens in honey bees. While previous studies have focused on the silencing of...

Honey is a natural product with many attributes that are useful for humans. The consumption of honey is increasing because of its beneficial biological properties, including antioxidant and antibacterial activities. Even though honey is produced worldwide, many variants of this product have not been studied and their biological potential for alternative uses has not been evaluated. Because of i...

Marriage in honey bees optimization (MBO) is a metaheuristic optimization algorithm developed by inspiration of the mating and fertilization process of honey bees and is a kind of swarm intelligence optimizations. In this study we propose improved marriage in honey bees optimization (IMBO) by adding Levy flight algorithm for queen mating flight and neighboring for worker drone improving. The IM...

Modelling the behavior of social insects has attracted much research recently. Although honey–bees exhibit many features that encourage their use as models for intelligent behavior, up to our knowledge, no attempt for using honey-bees as a basis for optimization has been made in the literature. Some of the features that distinguish honey–bees are division of labor, communication on the individu...

One of the values of biodiversity is that it may provide 'biological insurance' for services currently rendered by domesticated species or technology. We used crop pollination as a model system, and investigated whether the loss of a domesticated pollinator (the honey bee) could be compensated for by native, wild bee species. We measured pollination provided to watermelon crops at 23 farms in N...

BACKGROUND Honey bees are exposed to phytochemicals through the nectar, pollen and propolis consumed to sustain the colony. They may also encounter mycotoxins produced by Aspergillus fungi infesting pollen in beebread. Moreover, bees are exposed to agricultural pesticides, particularly in-hive acaricides used against the parasite Varroa destructor. They cope with these and other xenobiotics pri...