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Honey bees recruit foragers to rich food sources through the waggle dance. The waggle dance has been used extensively to study the foraging ecology of honey bees in various habitats. We decoded waggle dances and used DNA barcoding of bee-collected pollen to characterize the foraging ecology of honey bees Apis mellifera L.) over 17 months around La Jolla, California, a heavily fragmented environment containing urban, semi-urban, and patches of native scrub habitats. We divided the year into three distinct seasons (dormant, growth, and dry) based on natural patterns of warming and rainfall to understand how honey bee foraging varies over ecologically relevant temporal scales in a fragmented environment. We detected a significant effect of season on foraging distances. We also found that colonies focused their foraging efforts on few patches during the dormant season and performed increasingly wider searches for pollen with changes in season. Lastly, we detected significant seasonal turnover in the proportion of pollen loads with native or non-native pollen. Bees focused their pollen foraging on native species during the dormant season; both native and non-native species during the growth season; and, non-native species during the dry season. Our results show that honey bees are capable of adjusting their foraging behavior with season to exploit common, abundant native and non-native flowers, illustrating the remarkable adaptability of honey bees in fragmented habitats. Furthermore, our study indicates that honey bees may serve as pollinators of common native plants in light of declines in native pollinators bought on by habitat fragmentation.
The Foraging Behavior of the Honeybee (Apis mellifera, L.) provides a scholarly resource for knowledge on the regulation, communication, resource allocation, learning and characteristics of honeybee foraging behavior at the individual and colony level. Foraging, in this context, is the exploration of the environment around a honey bee hive and the collection of resources (pollen, nectar, water, etc.) by bees in the worker caste of a colony. Honeybees have the unique ability to balance conflicting and changing resource needs in rapidly changing environments, thus their characterization as “superorganisms made up of individuals who act in the interest of the whole. This book explores the fascinating world of honey bees in their struggle to obtain food and resources in the ecosystem and environment around the hive. Written by a team of international experts on honey bee behavior and ecology, this book covers current and historical knowledge, research methods and modeling used in the field of study and includes estimates of key parameters of energy utilization, quantities of materials collected, and identifies inconsistencies or gaps in current knowledge in the field. Establishes a basis of current knowledge on honeybees to build and advance understanding of their foraging behavior Addresses stressors such as habitat loss, climate change, pesticides, pests and diseases Presents concise concepts that facilitate direct traceability to the original underlying research
This book covers pot-pollen—the other product, besides honey, stored in cerumen pots by Meliponini. Critical assessment is given of stingless bee and pot-pollen biodiversity in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Topics addressed include historical biogeography, cultural knowledge, bee foraging behavior, pollination, ecological interactions, health applications, microbiology, the natural history of bee nests, and chemical, bioactive and individual plant components in stored pollen. Pot-pollen maintains the livelihoods of stingless bees and provides many interesting biological products that are just now beginning to be understood. The Meliponini have developed particular nesting biologies, uses of building materials, and an architecture for pollen storage. Environmental windows provide optimal temperature and availability of pollen sources for success in plant pollination and pollen storage. Palynological composition and pollen taxonomy are used to assess stingless honey bee pollination services. Pollen processing with microorganisms in the nest modifies chemical composition and bioactivity, and confers nutraceutical benefits to the honey and pollen widely relished by native people. Humans have always used stingless bees. Yet, sustainable meliponiculture (stingless bee-keeping) projects have so far lacked a treatise on pot-pollen, which experts provide in this transdisciplinary, groundbreaking volume.
Honey Bees: Estimating the Environmental Impact of Chemicals is an updated account of the different strategies for assessing the ecotoxicity of xenobiotics against these social insects, which play a key role in both ecology and agriculture. In addition to the classical acute laboratory test, semi-field cage tests and full field funnel tests, new te
Pollinators-insects, birds, bats, and other animals that carry pollen from the male to the female parts of flowers for plant reproduction-are an essential part of natural and agricultural ecosystems throughout North America. For example, most fruit, vegetable, and seed crops and some crops that provide fiber, drugs, and fuel depend on animals for pollination. This report provides evidence for the decline of some pollinator species in North America, including America's most important managed pollinator, the honey bee, as well as some butterflies, bats, and hummingbirds. For most managed and wild pollinator species, however, population trends have not been assessed because populations have not been monitored over time. In addition, for wild species with demonstrated declines, it is often difficult to determine the causes or consequences of their decline. This report outlines priorities for research and monitoring that are needed to improve information on the status of pollinators and establishes a framework for conservation and restoration of pollinator species and communities.
This book describes and illustrates the results of more than fifteen years of elegant experimental studies conducted by the author to investigate how a colony of bees is organized to gather its resources. The results of his research--including studies of the shaking signal, tremble dance, and waggle dance--offer the clearest, most detailed picture available of how a highly integrated animal society works.
While numerous factors currently impact the health of honey bees and other pollinating Hymenoptera, poor floral resource availability due to habitat loss and land conversion is thought to be important. This issue is particularly salient in the upper Midwest, a location which harbors approximately 60 percent of the US honey bee colonies each summer for honey production. This region has experienced a dramatic expansion in the area devoted to crop production over the past decade. Consequently, understanding how changes to landscape composition affect the diversity, quality and quantity of available floral resources has become an important research goal. Here, I developed molecular methods for the identification of bee-collected pollen by adapting and improving upon the existing amplicon sequencing infrastructure used for microbial community ecology. In thoroughly benchmarking our procedures, I show that a simple and cost-effective three-step PCR-based library preparation protocol in combination with Metaxa2-based hierarchical classification yields an accurate and highly quantitative pollen metabarcoding approach when applied across multiple plant markers.