Bees prioritize their unique waggle dance to find flowers

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

by Royal Holloway, University of London

Researchers at Royal Holloway have developed a method to track bee-to-bee communication in honeybee hives, showing how bees have many means to learn from their nest mates about the best flowers to visit, but it is their unique waggle dance which is prioritised above all else to find the best food sites.

Beehives are information centres, where many individuals wait in the hive for others to bring information back about rich flower patches. It has long been known that this information can be conveyed through waggle dances that encode the distance and compass direction that other bees should follow and how bees' impressive sense of smell can often lead them to flower patches without following a single dance.

However, in the new study, led by postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Matthew Hasenjager from the Department of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, the researchers traced the simultaneous spread of both dance-based and food-odour information as it travelled through the hive.

They showed that bees ignored the scents and overwhelmingly responded to the dances when looking for new flower patches.

Conversely, when temporarily inactive foragers are motivated to return to familiar foraging sites, dances played a secondary role to olfactory (sense of smell and taste) information gained through antennal interaction and by swapping food with colony mates.

Dr. Hasenjager, said: "We've known for a long time that bees can use the waggle dance to find new foraging sites, but the extent to which they actually do so is less well understood. Several recent studies have shown that colonies without this information often perform just fine.

"So to understand when the dance actually matters to the bees themselves, we developed a means to tease apart the effects of following dances from other ways bees can share information about food.

"We found that bees searching for new foraging locations relied overwhelmingly on dance-based information, whereas decisions to revisit known locations were instead guided mostly by olfactory communication."

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Evolutionary history of honeybees revealed by genomics

25th August 2014

18 hours ago

In a study published in Nature Genetics, researchers from Uppsala University present the first global analysis of genome variation in honeybees. The findings show a surprisingly high level of genetic diversity in honeybees, and indicate that the species most probably originates from Asia, and not from Africa as previously thought.

The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is of crucial importance for humanity. One third of our food is dependent on the pollination of fruits, nuts and vegetables by bees and other insects. Extensive losses of honeybee colonies in recent years are a major cause for concern. Honeybees face threats from disease, climate change, and management practices. To combat these threats it is important to understand the evolutionary history of honeybees and how they are adapted to different environments across the world.

Read more at: 

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-08-evolutionary-history-honeybees-revealed-genomics.html#jCp

Environmentalists sue California for ‘rubber stamping’ use of honeybee-killing pesticides

Three environmental and food safety nonprofits are suing the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) over its approval of insecticides linked to the massive die-off of honeybees in the state, saying the agency violated state laws by doing so.

The Pesticide Action Network North America, the Center for Food Safety, and Beyond Pesticides joined together to file the suit in a California Superior Court. They point to current research blaming the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the disease killing off honeybees and threatening pollination of the world’s crops, on two popular insecticides.

The two products, clothianidin and imidacloprid, are both types of neonicotinoids. Another study found that bees exposed to "field-realistic" doses of neonicotinoid insecticides gather less than half the pollen that they normally do, dooming their young to starvation.

Neonicotinoids were developed in the 1990s to boost yields of staple crops such as corn, but they are also widely used on annual and perennial plants in lawns and gardens. Researchers believe the neonicotinoids are causing some kind of unknown biological mechanism in bees that in turn leads to CCD.

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Honeybee sanctuary status for Colonsay and Oransay

The islands of Colonsay and Oronsay are to become a native honeybee sanctuary.

A new law will come into effect in January, making it illegal to import any bee other than the Apis mellifera mellifera to the area.

The Hebridean islands have about 50 colonies of the species and the new order aims to protect them from cross-breeding and disease.

The varroa mite, which has devastated bee colonies across the country, has not affected Colonsay or Oronsay.

There are 250 species of bee in the UK consisting of 24 species of bumblebees, 225 specifies solitary bees, but just one honeybee species, the native Black Bee (Apis mellifera mellifera).

The species is much hardier than the the Yellow or Italian Bee (Apis mellifera ligustica), which means the bees can survive the harsh climate of the Inner Hebrides.

The Scottish government granted the order after a public consultation received overwhelming support.

The Bee Keeping (Colonsay and Oronsay) Order 2013 comes into force on 1 January.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-24428707

Mites and Virus Team Up to Wipe Out Beehives

The spread of a parasitic mite through a honeybee colony provides a one-two punch that's taking down colonies throughout the world, now including Hawaii. A normally mild virus can be devastating to bees when the mites are present, a new study reports.

The mite, called Varroa, is spreading from hive to hive among the Hawaiian Islands. In other parts of the world, the coincidence of the mite and deformed wing virus has been linked to so-called colony collapse disorder, though researchers weren't sure how the two infections, normally not very deadly, were able to kill entire hives.

"During the past 50 years, the global spread of the ectoparasitic mite Varroa destructor has resulted in the death of millions of honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies," the researchers write in their study, detailed today (June 7) in the journal Science.

Read on:  http://www.livescience.com/20815-honeybee-collapse-mite-virus.html