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236 results for “Honeybees”
Phylogeography of cavity-nesting honeybees (Apis)
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Red and white clover provide food resources for honeybees and wild bees in urban environments
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Supporting data for: Honeybees adapt to a range of comb cell size by merging, tilting and layering their construction
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Data for the effect of optic flow cues on honeybee flight control in wind
<p><span>To minimise the risk of colliding with the ground or other obstacles, flying animals need to control both their ground speed and ground height. This task is particularly challenging in wind, where head winds require an animal to increase its airspeed to maintain a constant ground speed and tail winds may generate negative airspeeds, rendering flight more difficult to control. In this study, we investigate how head and tail winds affect flight control in the honeybee <i>Apis mellifera</i>, which is known to rely on the pattern of visual motion generated across the eye – known as optic flow – to maintain constant ground speeds and heights. We find that, when provided with optic flow cues in both the longitudinal and transverse directions of flight, honeybees maintain a constant ground speed but fly lower in head winds and higher in tail winds, a response that is also observed when longitudinal optic flow cues are minimised. This change in height with wind does not appear to result in a constant rate of optic flow in the ventral visual field, suggesting that honeybees may rely on a combination of mechanosensory and visual information when controlling flight in wind. We also find that, when the transverse component of optic flow is minimised, or when all optic flow cues are minimised, the effect of wind on ground height is abolished. We propose that the regular sidewards oscillations that the bees make as they fly may be used to extract information about the distance to the ground, independently of the longitudinal optic flow that they use for ground speed control. This computationally simple strategy could have potential uses in the development of lightweight and robust systems for guiding autonomous flying vehicles in natural environments.</span></p>
Metabolic rate shapes phenotypic covariance among physiological, behavioral, and life history traits in honeybees
<p><span>Metabolic rate is often cited as the fundamental rate that determines the rate of all biological processes by shaping energetic availability for the various behavioral and life history traits that contribute to performance. It has therefore been suggested that metabolic rate drives the widely observed covariance among these different levels of phenotypic traits. However, much of the work on this topic has relied on pairwise correlational analysis, thereby leaving an important gap in our understanding regarding the functional links that shape this phenotypic covariance, often referred to as pace-of-life. Using honeybees as an experimental model, we measured a large number of behavioral, life history and physiological traits in individual bees and used a structural equation model to characterize the phenotypic covariance structure among these traits. Following this with a path analysis, we demonstrate that variation in metabolic rate plays a fundamental proximate role in driving this phenotypic covariance structure in honeybees. We discuss the importance of these findings in the context of how interindividual variation in terms of slow-fast phenotypes may drive the phenotype of a group and the functional role metabolic rate might play in shaping division of labor and social evolution.</span></p>
Data from: Short-term effects of controlled mating and selection on the genetic variance of honeybee populations
<p>Directional selection in a population yields reduced genetic variance due to the Bulmer effect. While this effect has been thoroughly investigated in mammals, it is poorly studied in social insects with biological peculiarities such as haplo-diploidy or the collective expression of traits. In addition to natural adaptation to climate change, parasites, and pesticides, honeybees increasingly experience artificial selection pressure through modern breeding programs. Besides selection, many honeybee breeding schemes introduce controlled mating. We investigated which individual effects selection and controlled mating have on genetic variance. We derived formulas to describe short-term changes of genetic variance in honeybee populations and conducted computer simulations to confirm them. Thereby, we found that the changes in genetic variance depend on whether variance is measured between queens (inheritance criterion), worker groups (selection criterion) or both (performance criterion). All three criteria showed reduced genetic variance under selection. In the selection and performance criteria, our formulas and simulations showed an increased genetic variance through controlled mating.<br> This newly described effect counterbalanced and occasionally outweighed the Bulmer effect. It could not be observed in the inheritance criterion. A good understanding of the different notions of genetic variance in honeybees therefore appears crucial to interpret population parameters correctly.</p>
Data from: Gradual replacement of wild bees by honeybees in flowers of the Mediterranean Basin over the last 50 years
<p>Evidence for pollinator declines largely originates from mid-latitude regions in North America and Europe. Geographical heterogeneity in pollinator trends combined with geographical biases in pollinator studies, can produce distorted extrapolations and limit understanding of pollinator responses to environmental changes. In contrast to the declines experienced in some well-investigated European and North American regions, honeybees seem to have increased recently in some areas of the Mediterranean Basin. Since honeybees can have negative impacts on wild bees, it was hypothesized that a biome-wide alteration in bee pollinator assemblages may be underway in the Mediterranean Basin involving a reduction in the relative number of wild bee pollinators. This hypothesis was tested using published quantitative data on bee pollinators of wild and cultivated plants from studies conducted between 1963-2017 in 13 Mediterranean countries. The density of honeybee colonies increased exponentially and wild bees were gradually replaced by honeybees in flowers of wild and cultivated plants. The proportion of wild bees at flowers was four times greater than that of honeybees at the beginning of the period, the proportions of both groups becoming roughly similar fifty years later. The Mediterranean Basin is a world biodiversity hotspot for wild bees and wild bee-pollinated plants, and the ubiquitous rise of honeybees to dominance as pollinators could in the long run undermine the diversity of plants and wild bees in the region.</p>
Data from: Risk of potential pesticide use to honeybee and bumblebee survival and distribution: a country-wide analysis for The Netherlands
Aim: Bees play an important role in natural ecosystems and the world's food supply. In the past decades, bee abundance and diversity have declined globally. This has resulted in decreased pollination services for natural ecosystems and the agricultural sector at the field scale. One of the causes of the decline in bee abundance and diversity is the use of pesticides. Linking pesticide use, land use and bee presence could provide crucial insights into areas and pesticides that pose a significant threat to the abundance and diversity of bees. Obtaining actual figures of farmer pesticide use is rarely possible. Therefore, we designed a method to study the effects of potential pesticide use on the survival and distribution of honey- and bumblebees. Location: The Netherlands. Methods: A pesticide risk model was implemented incorporating a hazard quotient as the risk assessment. The number of allowed pesticide active ingredients per crop that could pose a risk to honeybees and bumblebees were linked to the Dutch crop parcel locations for 2015 and 2016. The potential pesticide risk maps were analyzed using honeybee colony survival and bumblebee presence data. Results: Non-significant negative effects of potential pesticide risk on honeybee colony survival and bumblebee presence were found. A significant negative effect of greenhouses was identified for both honeybees and bumblebees. The most important factors in the models predicting honeybee colony survival and bumblebee presence were urban land areas and natural grasslands respectively, both showing a positive effect. Main conclusions: Here, the first attempt to estimate and map pesticide risk to bees in the Netherlands in a country-wide manner is presented. The results could provide crucial high-resolution insights for bee conservation action and facilitate the increase of pollination services in natural ecosystems and the agricultural sector on a local and country-wide scale.
Data from: Covert deformed wing virus infections have long-term deleterious effects on honeybee foraging and survival
Several studies have suggested that covert stressors can contribute to bee colony declines. Here we provide a novel case study and show using radiofrequency identification tracking technology that covert deformed wing virus (DWV) infections in adult honeybee workers seriously impact long-term foraging and survival under natural foraging conditions. In particular, our experiments show that adult workers injected with low doses of DWV experienced increased mortality rates, that DWV caused workers to start foraging at a premature age, and that the virus reduced the workers' total activity span as foragers. Altogether, these results demonstrate that covert DWV infections have strongly deleterious effects on honeybee foraging and survival. These results are consistent with previous studies that suggested DWV to be an important contributor to the ongoing bee declines in Europe and the USA. Overall, our study underlines the strong impact that covert pathogen infections can have on individual and group-level performance in bees.
Data from: SNPs selected by information content outperform randomly selected microsatellite loci for delineating genetic identification and introgression in the endangered dark European honeybee (Apis mellifera mellifera)
The honeybee (Apis mellifera) has been threatened by multiple factors, including pests and pathogens, pesticides, and loss of locally adapted gene complexes due to replacement and introgression. In western Europe, the genetic integrity of the native A.m. mellifera (M-lineage) is endangered due to trading and intensive queen breeding with commercial subspecies of eastern European ancestry (C-lineage). Effective conservation actions require reliable molecular tools to identify purebred A.m. mellifera colonies. Microsatellites have been preferred for identification of A.m. mellifera stocks across conservation centers. However, owing to high-throughput, easy transferability between laboratories and low genotyping error, SNPs promise to become popular. Here, we compared the resolving power of a widely utilized microsatellite dataset to detect structure and introgression with that of different datasets that combine a variable number of SNPs selected for their information content and genomic proximity to the microsatellites. Contrary to every SNP dataset, microsatellites were unable to clearly separate the two European lineages in the PCA space. Mean introgression proportions were identical across the two marker types, although at the individual level microsatellites' performance was relatively poor at the upper range of introgression, a result reflected by their lower precision. Although mean accuracy was relatively high across datasets (>91%), microsatellites were the least accurate and the top-ranked informative 144 SNPs were the most accurate. Comparisons amongst the SNP datasets showed that those combining SNPs flanking microsatellites performed worst. Our results suggest that SNPs are more powerful for identification of A.m. mellifera colonies, especially when they are selected by information content.
Data from: Influence of the honeybee and trait similarity on the effect of a non-native plant on pollination and network rewiring
Introduced entomophilous non-native plants usually become well integrated into the diet of generalist pollinators. This integration can affect the entire recipient plant–pollinator network. Effects vary from facilitative to competitive, and understanding the factors that govern such variability is one of the fundamental goals in invasion ecology. Species traits determine the linking patterns between plant and pollinator species. Therefore, trait similarity among plants or among pollinators might modulate how they affect each other. We conducted a flower removal experiment to investigate the effects of the non-native entomophilous legume Hedysarum coronarium on the pollination patterns of a Mediterranean shrubland plant–pollinator network. Specifically, we explored whether effects were influenced by similarity with the resident plant species in flower morphology (papilionate vs. non-papilionate), and whether effects on the pollinator community were influenced by similarity in functional group with its main visitor species (bees vs. non-bees). In addition, we explored whether Hedysarum had an effect on the identity of interactions. For this purpose, we calculated the interaction rewiring, that is the number of plant–pollinator interactions that were gained or lost after invasion. Hedysarum was well integrated into the diet of 15 generalist pollinators having the honeybee as its main visitor species. Such integration did not affect visitation rates, normalized degree (i.e. proportion of pollinators they are visited by) nor niche overlap (i.e. proportion of plant species they share pollinators with) of plants, irrespective of their flower morphology. Only the proportion of honeybee visits to resident plants decreased with invasion. On the other hand, Hedysarum reduced visitation rates and niche overlap of pollinators, mainly those of bee species. Finally, we observed that changes in the foraging behaviour of the honeybee were positively associated with the interaction rewiring involving the rest (92 taxa) of pollinators. In conclusion, pollinators show a plastic use of floral resources, responding to the presence of non-native plants. When the non-native attracts highly competitive pollinators such as the honeybee, plasticity is especially significant in pollinators that are functionally close to that competitive pollinator. The result is an interaction rewiring, probably due to pollinators avoiding competition with the honeybee. Though this plasticity might not quantitatively affect the pollination of plants, consequences on their reproduction and the functioning of the network can derive from the interaction rewiring.
Data from: Seminal fluid of honeybees contains multiple mechanisms to combat infections of the sexually transmitted pathogen Nosema apis
The societies of ants, bees and wasps are genetically closed systems where queens only mate during a brief mating episode prior to their eusocial life and males therefore provide queens with a lifetime supply of high-quality sperm. These ejaculates also contain a number of defence proteins that have been detected in the seminal fluid but their function and efficiency have never been investigated in great detail. Here, we used the honeybee Apis mellifera and quantified whether seminal fluid is able to combat infections of the fungal pathogen Nosema apis, a widespread honeybee parasite that is also sexually transmitted. We provide the first empirical evidence that seminal fluid has a remarkable antimicrobial activity against N. apis spores and that antimicrobial seminal fluid components kill spores in multiple ways. The protein fraction of seminal fluid induces extracellular spore germination, which disrupts the life cycle of N. apis, whereas the non-protein fraction of seminal fluid induces a direct viability loss of intact spores. We conclude that males provide their ejaculates with efficient antimicrobial molecules that are able to kill N. apis spores and thereby reduce the risk of disease transmission during mating. Our findings could be of broader significance to master honeybee diseases in managed honeybee stock in the future.
Data from: Trypanosomatid parasites infecting managed honeybees and wild solitary bees
The parasite Crithidia mellificae (Kinetoplastea: Trypanosomatidae) infects honeybees, Apis mellifera. No pathogenic effects have been found in individual hosts, despite positive correlations between infections and colony mortalities. The solitary bee Osmia cornuta might constitute a host, but controlled infections are lacking to date. Here, we challenged male and female O. cornuta and honeybee workers in laboratory cages with C. mellificae. No parasite cells were found in any control. Parasite numbers increased 6.6 fold in honeybees between days 6 and 19 p.i. and significantly reduced survival. In O. cornuta, C. mellificae numbers increased 2 to 3.6 fold within cages and significantly reduced survival of males, but not females. The proportion of infected hosts increased in O. cornuta cages with faeces, but not in honeybee cages without faeces, suggesting faecal - oral transmission. The data show that O. cornuta is a host of C. mellificae and suggest that males are more susceptible. The higher mortality of infected honeybees proposes a mechanism for correlations between C. mellificae infections and colony mortalities.
Data from: Experimental evidence that honeybees depress wild insect densities in a flowering crop
While addition of managed honeybees (Apis mellifera) improves pollination of many entomophilous crops, it is unknown if it simultaneously suppresses the densities of wild insects through competition. To investigate this, we added 624 honeybee hives to 23 fields of oilseed rape (Brassica napus L.) over 2 years and made sure that the areas around 21 other fields were free from honeybee hives. We demonstrate that honeybee addition depresses the densities of wild insects (bumblebees, solitary bees, hoverflies, marchflies, other flies, and other flying and flower-visiting insects) even in a massive flower resource such as oilseed rape. The effect was independent of the complexity of the surrounding landscape, but increased with the size of the crop field, which suggests that the effect was caused by spatial displacement of wild insects. Our results have potential implications both for the pollination of crops (if displacement of wild pollinators offsets benefits achieved by adding honeybees) and for conservation of wild insects (if displacement results in negative fitness consequences).
Spectrophotometrical raw data of viability and total sugar content included in the paper "Promastigote EPS secretion and haptomonad biofilm formation as evolutionary adaptations of trypanosomatid parasites for colonizing honeybee hosts"
<p>Raw data of spectrophotometrical data included in the paper: "Promastigote EPS secretion and haptomonad biofilm formation as evolutionary adaptations of trypanosomatid parasites for colonizing honeybee hosts" published in npj biofilms and Microbiomes. </p>
training dataset of honeybee
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Pesticide risk during commercial apple pollination is greater for honeybees than other managed and wild bees
<p>Data and code relating to the manuscript “Pesticide risk during commercial apple pollination is greater for honeybees than other managed and wild bees”</p> <p>Files are organized as follows</p> <p><strong>input</strong> - contains the main data files.</p> <ul> <li> <p>all_pesticide2019.csv – contains the pesticide residue data for all samples</p> </li> <li> <p>LD50.csv – contains pesticide LD50s in PPB</p> </li> <li> <p>ld50_per_bee.csv – contains pesticide LD50s in ug / honeybee</p> </li> <li> <p>nesting_type.csv – lists nesting types of the different bee samples</p> </li> <li> <p>pesticide_type.csv – lists pesticides by their type</p> </li> <li> <p>short_name.csv – lists short bee names</p> <p><strong>folder “gis”</strong></p> <ul> <li>hive_distance_matrix.csv – distances from each orchard to other sites</li> <li>sitelocation.csv – contains coordinates of sites</li> </ul> </li> </ul> <p><strong>code</strong> - contains the scripts to analyze the input files</p> <ul> <li>pesticide_analysis.R – is the main anaylsis for the paper</li> <li>unadjusted_pesticide_analysis.R – is a copy of most of the code above but without LD50 weight adjustements</li> </ul> <p><strong>ld50 adjust</strong> - contains the inputs and code for the ld50 adjustments I ran</p> <ul> <li>ld50_adjust.R – is the code to calculate our the adjustements</li> <li>2020_BeeTox_database_acute_contact_publication_final_R1.csv – is the data file taken from pamminger publication</li> </ul>
Number of N. ceranae spores in the honeybees from groups 1 and 2
<p>This file contain raw results from Figures 1-2 and Table 5 (Kunat-Budzyńska M., Łabuć E., Ptaszyńska A.A. 2025, Seasonal detection of pathogens in honeybees kept in natural and laboratory conditions, Parasitology International, 1383-5769, doi: 10.1016/j.parint.2024.102978). The work was financed by the National Science Centre, Poland, project number 2021/41/N/NZ6/00735.</p>
Adaptive evolution of honeybee dance dialects
Efficient communication is highly important for the evolutionary success of social animals. Honeybees (genus Apis) are unique in that they communicate the spatial information of resources using a symbolic "language", the waggle dance. Different honeybee species differ in foraging ecology but it remains unknown whether this shaped variation in the dance. We studied distance dialects – interspecific differences in how waggle duration relates to flight distance – and tested the hypothesis that these evolved to maximize communication precision over the bees' foraging ranges. We performed feeder experiments with Apis cerana, A. florea and A. dorsata in India and found that A. cerana had the steepest dialect, i.e. a rapid increase in waggle duration with increasing feeder distance, A. florea had an intermediate, and A. dorsata had the lowest dialect. By decoding dances for natural food sites, we inferred that the foraging range was smallest in A. cerana, intermediate in A. florea and largest in A. dorsata. The inverse correlation between foraging range and dialect was corroborated when comparing six (sub)species across the geographic range of the genus including previously published data. We conclude that dance dialects constitute adaptations resulting from a trade-off between the spatial range and the spatial accuracy of communication.
Data from: Female developmental environment delays development of male honeybee (Apis mellifera)
<p><b><span>Background</span></b></p> <p>Nutrition and cell size play an important role in the determination of caste differentiation in queen and worker of honeybees (<i><span>Apis mellifera</span></i>), whereas the haploid genome dominates the differentiation of drones. However, the effects of female developmental environment on the development of males remain unclear. In this study, young drone larvae were transferred into worker cells (WCs) or remained in drone cells (DCs) to rear drones. The drone larvae were also grafted into queen cells (QCs) for 48 hrs and then transplanted into drone cells until emerging. Morphological indexes and reproductive organs of these three types of newly emerged drones were measured. Newly emerged drones and 3-day drone larvae from WCs, DCs and QCs were sequenced by RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq).</p> <p><b><span>Result</span></b><b><span>s</span></b></p> <p>The amount of food remaining in cells of the QC and WC groups was significantly different to that in the DC group at the early larval stage. Morphological results showed that newly emerged DC drones had bigger body sizes and more well-developed reproductive tissues than WC and QC drones, whereas the reproductive tissues of QC drones were relatively larger than those of WC drones. Additionally, gene expression results showed a clear difference among three groups. At the larval stage, there were 889, 1761 and 1927 significantly differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in WC/DC, QC/DC and WC/QC comparisons, respectively. The number of DEGs decreased in adult drones of these three comparisons [678 (WC/DC), 338 (QC/DC) and 518 (WC/QC)]. A high number of DEGs were involved in sex differentiation, growth, olfaction, vision, mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), Wnt signaling pathways, and other processes. </p> <p><b><span>Conclusion</span></b></p> <p>This study demonstrated that the developmental environment of honeybee females can delay male development, which serves as a model for understanding the regulation of sex differentiation and male development in social insects by environmental factors.</p>
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Allen Brain Atlas
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DANDI Archive for NWB datasets
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International Brain Laboratory public data
The International Brain Laboratory public data releases expose standardized mouse decision-making experiments, including Neuropixels recordings, widefield calcium imaging, behavior, and session metadata accessed through the ONE API.
OpenNeuro
OpenNeuro is a free, open platform for sharing neuroimaging datasets, with public search, dataset pages, and download paths for web, S3, DataLad, and the OpenNeuro CLI.