The polygyne form of the red imported Þre ant, Solenopsis invicta Buren, is thought to occur primarily in discrete populations embeddedwithin areas composed ofmonogyne colonies. This distribution implies that polygyne colonies competewithmonogyne colonies and subsequently create a population homogenous in social form. Because polygyne colonies produce mostly sterile males, opportunities for ins...

In colonies, bacteria are often densely packed due to strong attractive forces between neighboring cells. For organisms where aggregation is mediated by type 4 pili interactions, the pilus-mediated motor activity fluidizes these but it unclear how close packaging affects bacterial motility. Here, we characterize dynamics of single cells over five orders magnitude in time. At short timescales, f...

We selected honey bee colonies (Apis mellifera L.) with a high tendency to collect sunflower pollen and estimated the heritability of this trait. The percentage of sunflower pollen collected by 74 colonies was evaluated. Five colonies that collected the highest percentages of sunflower pollen were selected. Nineteen colonies headed by daughters of these selected queens were evaluated for this c...

Varroa destructor, the introduced parasite of European honey bees associated with massive colony deaths, spreads readily through populations of honey bee colonies, both managed colonies living crowded together in apiaries and wild colonies living widely dispersed in natural settings. Mites are hypothesized to spread between most managed colonies via phoretically riding forager bees when they en...

In this study we investigated the variation in grazing scar densities between bleached and non-bleached colonies of massive Porites species in Sekisei Lagoon (Okinawa, southwestern Japan) during a mass bleaching event in 2016. The grazing scar densities and bleaching susceptibility varied among neighboring colonies of massive Porites spp. However, non-bleached colonies had significantly more su...