Honeybees - Science topic

You should ask someone from the locality of interest. The stock and health of the bees, the floral environment, the weather, the physical hive, competion from other colonies and the human management all influence the production of a colony. In good conditions, a colony can produce over 200 kg of honey surplus to its own maintenance, but surplus yields of less than 20 kg honey are also possible.

Fatma Mohmmed Emeetteg

What do you mean by glassbrush flowers?

Thanks!

Hello Natalie El-Bittar

I am concerned about the upper aqueous phase which is always slightly pink/brown after phase separation. The upper aqueous phase is usually colorless and clear.

There are a few possibilities you need to consider.

1. If your sample contains fat micelles, they may pick up pigment from the TRIzol itself and cause a pinkish color. So, if you feel that your sample is thought to contain fat, the sample homogenate in TRIzol may be centrifuged prior to addition of chloroform. The fat will appear as a clear layer at the top of the supernatant. This should be pipetted off and discarded.

2. A pinkish aqueous phase may also be caused by over-dilution of the sample namely, the sample:TRIzol ratio > 1:10; as well as too much salt or protein in the sample. This can cause premature phase separation, which can be solved by adding a bit more TRIzol to the sample. Always maintain a ratio of 10:1 between the volume of TRIzol and the mass of the sample. Please note that if you isolate RNA from a pinkish aqueous phase, there are chances that it will be contaminated with DNA.

3. If you record a poor 260/280 ratio for RNA it may be because of the following.

a. Sample may have been homogenized in too small a volume of TRIzol.

b. Sample may not have been stored at room temperature for 5 minutes after homogenization.

c. Final RNA pellet may not have been fully dissolved. This may be the case if the RNA pellet has overdried.

d. There may be phenol contamination. This may occur if sample may have been centrifuged at room temperature instead of 4°C as phenol is more soluble in the aqueous phase at room temperature. If absorbance is seen at 270 nm (phenol), then sample can be ethanol precipitated to remove residual phenol.

e. If sample is dissolved in water, the ratio may be low due to the acidity of the water or the low ion content in water. The ratio can go up if the sample is dissolved in TE and the spectrophotometer is zeroed with TE.

Hope these suggestions help!

Best.

For the purpose of collecting a swarm of bees there is no need of smoke. They are not aggressive in this situation. The swarm can be placed in a cardboard box, or a burlap sack. Better to wear cloth gloves.

Hello, is an interesting approach since environmental enrichment mainly is focused on captive animals, since the premise is that we try to provide an environment that stimulates and provide the animal certain level of “control” of their surroundings with the goal to reduce stress. Also, I recommend you to focus on the type of enrichment that you are providing and the behavior that you are measuring.

Regarding honey bees the blue honey and M&M factory event can give you an outlook for your research on behavior and preference.

I found this material, perhaps it might be useful: Hoffmann, B. D. (2023). Honey bees are not attracted to multiple new ant bait matrices containing sugar. Bulletin of Entomological Research, 113(2), 190-195

The cubital index is a measure of the relative length of the cubital vein, which is a vein located in the forewing of a honeybee. The cubital index is calculated by dividing the length of the cubital vein by the length of the wing and expressing the result as a percentage.

The cubital index is used as a morphological character in the identification and classification of honeybee subspecies and populations. It has been found that the cubital index can vary significantly among different honeybee subspecies and populations, with some subspecies having a relatively long cubital vein and others having a relatively short one.

There is some evidence to suggest that the cubital index may be related to the foraging behavior of honeybees. Some studies have found that honeybees with a higher cubital index may be more efficient at foraging and more successful at finding food resources, while those with a lower cubital index may be less efficient at foraging.

In addition to its use in the identification and classification of honeybees, the cubital index may also have practical applications in the management of honeybee colonies. For example, some beekeepers may use the cubital index as a tool for selecting bees with desirable foraging traits for breeding purposes.

Hello Lina María García Forero,

If your experimental goal is to detect apoptosis and/or necrosis in kenyon cells of honeybee, I would suggest you to carry out the experiments as given below:

Take out the kenyon cells and fix them in 4% PFA on the slide and then carry out ICC using apoptosis markers to see the extent of apoptosis in the cell of your interest.

Once you find that your experimental protocol induces apoptosis/necrosis then try to harvest the cells (>10000 kenyon cells) and then conduct the flow cytometry using apoptosis/necrosis markers antiobody tagged to FITC/TRITC etc.

Best

passage it to 30 % sucrose solution after 15% sucrose immersion for 2-3 days then passage it to cold (-80) methyl butane solution for remove bubble in fast freezing prosses then embed in OCT medium in dry ice.

The collected pollen from pollen trap during clear sunny days should b transfer in airtight containers and it can be stored either in refrigrator in the areas where summer temperature rises upto 30 degree centigrade. However in cold climatic condition it can be either stored under normal room temperature..but refrigrator is recommended. Yes it can be use as feed for bee colonies during dearth period either as single feed or by mixing with other components ie soybean flour 'icing sugar'glucose'gram flour etc to make a patty and thn supply to bees as feed during dearth conditions.

Hi Shabir,

A lot of protein patties are existing now in the market, but often locally produced and not so evident to buy.

If you want to produce it by yourself, the general idea is to make a patty with rather high protein content (16-20% calculated on dry matter) and to put it in contact with the brood nest so that nurse bees can directly consume it. To reach this amount of protein content, you need to use higt proteic sources, like leguminosae flour (soja, peas, etc) or yeast.

You may use at least 10% of pollen (from healthy colonies) to mix with your proteic source, as pollen contains some attractive substances inciting bees to consume it. Mix pollen and proteic source with some syrup and water to get a correct consistency.

Put 50g to 200g by colony each week when necessary, but verify that the bees consumed it, as they always prefer fresh pollen of their own instead of patties.

Hope this helps.

This is just my personal view nothing to do with others view

If we want the students to increase thier performance and efficiency

I think it's best to teach their favourite subject and teach them where to use, when to use, how to use after that to teach them others subjects and tell them it's necessary to know this subject too for their future but most importantly we should first found out about their like and dislike subject then teach them what they like then their dislike

sorry, i don´t work on honeybee acoustics

Hi Tura,

This number is often defined in pollination contracts, that are mainly respected by the major farmers. I suggest you to collect some of these contracts among beekeepers or seed/fruit producers so you can make an estimation of the "economical need" for crop pollination.

If your question is about the "real" number of colonies necessary for crop pollination, you have to consider the landscape aroud the crops.

- if there is a largely diversified flora/fauna, and the global part of you crop in the landscape is small (<20% for instance) and if the individual surface of each crop is small (<1ha for instance), the natural pollinators will be generally sufficient.

- if your crop is the major part of your landscape, and the rest is poor for pollinators, you should bring colonies as Marian told.

Michel

There are plenty of articles around that investigates varying aspects of dancing patterns in Honey bees, see a few examples below, all are from 2016 and onward:

Dear Sujeesh Sukumaran in addition to the useful information provided by Chinaza Godswill Awuchi please also see this interesting link entitled "USING NMR TO DETECT HONEY FRAUD":

Dear Julien Serres

I have successfully worked with the RFID technology from https://www.microsensys.de/en/solutions/small-animals-identification/

However, I wouldn't call it "low-cost" as it is currently very pricey, i.e. > 1 EUR per chip + the readers and host 2000-3000 EUR.

You can check the following review for some more resources and contacts to authors who used different manufacturers:

Cheers,

Richard

No such information is reported, I think.

Thanks

N Das

Have you asked your advisor or other people in the department for help? You should be able to find someone at your university to help with these sorts of questions.

From UCLA, though:

"The [linked] table shows general guidelines for choosing a statistical analysis. We emphasize that these are general guidelines and should not be construed as hard and fast rules. Usually your data could be analyzed in multiple ways, each of which could yield legitimate answers."

For sure, Adrian and various collaborators of his argued that bees locate foods solely by odours. That was around 1923.

It seems, though, like Von Frisch was the first to witness bee's communication. But you may want to read Ameisen, Bienen und Wespen: Beobachtungen über die Lebensweise der geselligen hymenopteren by John Lubbock (1899). I unfortunately couldn't find a translated version.

However in The Bee Battles: Karl von Frisch, Adrian Wenner and the Honey Bee Dance Language Controversy" by Tanya Munz in 2005, she mentions: " Von Frisch was not the first to investigate insect communication. In his 1923 paper,he already cited nine other well-known authors who’d investigated bee and antcommunication. Buttel-Reepen, 1900, 1912, 1915; Wasmann, 1909 [1899]; Forel, 1910,1924 [1874]; Lubbock, 1883."

...Nanotechnology has tremendous applications in the food, pesticide, fertilizer, chemical, and agriculture industries. Nanostructures or nanoformulations are fabricated by manipulating, at atomic or molecular level, reactants in definite ratios for improving the physical, chemical, and conduction properties as well as strengthening the functioning materials applicable in agriculture, medicine, and environmental monitoring. ... The nanoparticles, APC molded into functional nano-biopesticides via green technology, could selectively target insects for plant and environmental safety. ... Lade, B. D., & Gogle, D. P. (2019). Nano-biopesticides: Synthesis and Applications in Plant Safety. In Nanobiotechnology Applications in Plant Protection (pp. 169-189). Springer, Cham.

Dear Audrey Labonte

I think that the pollen should not change greatly morphologically. Try it should work.

Regards, Sergey Viktorovich Pushkin

While it is clear that Apis mellifera (as well as many human food crops) have been introduced to other parts of the world, the matter of whether that was a negative, positive or neutral influence is to me, a question, not a fact.

You could simply use Poisson regression. This is easy in R, a good link for this is: https://rcompanion.org/handbook/J_01.html

What you basically should do:

1. Run a poisson regression and a null model. In R, your code would look something like this:

yourmodel <- glm(deadbees ~ Treatment, family = poisson, data = beedata)

nullmodel <- glm(deadbees ~ 1, family = poisson, data = beedata)

2. Then compare both models to judge whether treatment has an effect

anova(yourmodel, nullmodel, test = "F")

3. An important assumption of Poisson regression is that the variance is equal to the expected value. If the variance is bigger (which is often the case), your data is overdispersed, and you will have a high risk of type I errors (falsely rejecting the null hypothesis). Therefore, you should test for overdispersion. In R, you could use the package 'AER':

Now, there are two possibilities:

a. If your dispersion test is not significant, this means that a poisson distribution is appropriate: you can continue with your current model.

b. If your data is overdispersed (dispersion test significant), you should use an alternative to the poisson distribution, e.g. Negative binomial distribution.

In case of a: if the effect of treatment is significant, you want to know the differences between the groups. For this, you could use a post-hoc test. You will need a few packages though. R-code:

Now your output shows your parameter estimates of each group. Groups that do not differ significantly from each other are indicated with the same letter in the .group column.

In case of b, you need to run a new model using a negative binomial distribution:

Here, R performs a chi-square test. If significant, there is at least a significant difference between some treatments. You can do the same post-hoc test as you would have done with a Poisson model, but now use this model (negbinmodel), instead of the poisson model (yourmodel).

Neonics are insecticides. Insecticides kill insects. Bees are insects.

Bees are a special problem because they collect nectar and then concentrate everything in the nectar. That includes any insecticide. This is then fed to small larvae which due to their size are exceptionally vulnerable.

That said, politics and money get involved and the result can be a problem.

" ( Wang, S., Guo, Q., Wang, L., Lin, L., Shi, H., Cao, H., & Cao, B. (2015). Detection of honey adulteration with starch syrup by high performance liquid chromatography. Food chemistry, 172, 669-674)

According to saccharide profile comparison between starch syrups and pure honeys analysed through high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), a characteristic peak was found at 15.25 min retention time in HPLC chromatogram of syrup, but no peak was observed at the same retention time in chromatogram of pure honeys. This characteristic peak for syrup was identified as an overlapping peak of oligosaccharides with more than 5 degree of polymerisation (DP) based on HPLC chromatogram comparison between starch syrup and a series of standard mono-, di- and oligosaccharides of 3–7 DP. Additionally syrup content correlated linearly with the height of the characteristic peak of syrup under different slope in two ranges 2.5–7.5% and 10–100%, respectively. Therefore, the characteristic peak at 15.25 min retention time can serve as a syrup indicator in HPLC analysis of the adulterated honeys. This new HPLC method for honey adulteration detection was further applied in an authenticity inspection on more than 100 commercial honeys. In addition to the improved accuracy of honey adulteration detection, the proposed HPLC method was simple, low cost and easy practice for honey product quality control by government department considering the popularity of HPLC device and technology".

Hello Maximilian Spiegelberg ,

Contrary to what some environmental activist groups are claiming, data collected by the crop protection industry from the USDA, FAO and StatisticsCanada shows that "honey"bee populations even in intensely farmed areas of the world are increasing rather than rapidly decreasing in the last decades (see graphs).

The main cause for honey bee colony losses is due to inadequate or even due to no Varroa treatment at all. The responsibility lies with the beekeeper.

However, honey bee colonies as a superorganism seem to buffer stressors of different kinds more "easily" when compared to other, primitive eusocial or solitary pollinators.

This is why, for instance, many findings of pesticide effects on the individual bee level do not necessarily translate to the colony level. Strong colonies are able to take a lot of damage on the one hand, and are maintained by beekeepers on the other, being able to balance environmetal impacts. This does not apply to bumble bees, solitary bees and most other pollinators!

In my opinion, future bee research should therefore focus on (i) a more effective, sustainable and easy to apply Varroa treatment (with the final aim of a stable parasite-host relationship), (ii) better trained beekeepers and (iIi) shift the focus more on other pollinators than honey bees to generate monitoring data, giving insights in possible losses and regional problems.

Richard

have a look this link getting some ideas https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8156&context=etd

Hello,

Even though pollination through different bee species is given, hand cross pollination seems by far more effective:

The species of Trigona spp. seems to be ahead of self pollination in Indonesia:

And it seems that small native species of bees pollinate the chili flowers effectively in Brazil:

Pollination efficiency of hot pepper by honey bee, stingless bee, and self-pollination were compared in Indonesia:

However none of the above mentioned studies deal with hybrids in particular. Nevertheless I would suggest that the western honey bee should be capable of this task, probably as well as bumblebees (Bombus spp.), commercially avialable.

Thanks a lot for this great clarification, although I left Saudi Arabia 3 years ago and the questions was to figure out how larger carpenter bees is adapted to get nectar from Calotropis procera. The stems of the plans also were used by bees for nesting. I may try to find this work again when I will be back to Egypt after my research visit to Hungary.

Thanks again Christopher and I wish for you all the best.

If you want to prevent robbing you can equip your hives with robbing screens and reduce the size of the entrances. You should also try to separate them at least a few meters from each other.

Usually robbing results in fights at the entrance of the hive and in a large pile of pieces of wax on the bottom board or at the entrance. This wax comes from the honey being uncapped by the robbers.

I might have confused with my answer. I'm in northern Canada, was just visiting in Tanzania (there, honey bees are the dominant (and native) pollinator, doing well and with no obvious effect from Varroa). Here in my part of Canada bumblebees seem to be doing very well. I was trying to find for you a reference to a paper that TRACKED bumblebees (GPS) in Britain (I think) and showed a map of individual foraging that would interest you. Sorry I didn't find it.

Swarming is the natural reproduction process and it has advantages and disadvantages for the beekeeper. Preventing swarming also comes at a cost (like checking the colonies often, searching and destroying queen cells). If you catch the swarm, you have a new family. The recently swarmed colony will need to raise a new queen and that will lower your production. Swarming can actually be beneficial against varroa: the colony which has swarmed will have no brood for a month more or less, so the varroa will not be able to reproduce, it is also a good time to treat. The swarm will have no brood either, so once you have it in a box you can treat it and kill all the varroa. Have in mind that in most of the world varroa control is the biggest problem beekepers face.

Yemeni honey bees have a good ability to survive under high temperature conditions but not up to 50C. The survival ability of honey bees can be enhance by providing the bees with good water resources, protect the bees from direct sunlight, house the bees in a suitable beehive type with good ventilation, and provide the bees with suitable amount of food. Also, you should take care about relative humidity, bees can survive better under conditions of high temperature and high relative humidity (about 65% or more) than conditions of high temperature and low relative humidity (65% or more).

I'd use a von Bertalanffy growth model and make the appropriate allometric weight-for-length substitution. See page 49: http://derekogle.com/fishR/examples/oldFishRVignettes/VonBertalanffy.pdf .

That's a 4 parameter nonlinear model. You could pool data across incubation conditions, then add a factor variable encoding those incubation conditions. You could then allow one, two, three, or all four parameters of the model to vary across conditions. If you had two incubation conditions and you let all four parameters vary, then you are estimating 8 parameters. Use AICc to determine if you should constrain some parameters to remain constant across conditions.

If you've never maximized a likelihood before, then you might need to consult a statistician. I'm not aware of any canned routines out there for doing this, but some may very well exist.

Good luck!

"Recently, hive equipment has been made of materials other than wood. Plastic material is most commonly used and all hive parts, including one piece molded combs made from plastic, are available to the beekeeper. Generally, plastic equipment is as yet unproved, more expensive than wooden equipment, and being used to a very limited extent by the industry." in Beekeeping in the United States.

To my knowledge nobody has tested this yet, and this equipment is much more expensive than wood. Given that you can't smoke it or expose it to a flame to kill spores after fould brood infections, when swapping equipment between hives, or to clean wax an propolis, I would not recommend buying plastic equipment.

Also, beekeeping is this fantastic agricultural field where everything can be made of recyclable and degradable materials (metal, wood and wax mostly), why would someone want to bring plastic in this?

Hi Maharul,

Practical models of vertical farming with fish farming are there in India. Combining it with honeybee, I have not seen. Best wisher to you.

Regards

Emmanuel

Here is my answer to this question:

Lane titration for reducing sugars.  HPLC for monosaccharides commonly found in honey like Fructose and Glucose.

I agree with the answer of Wojciech Cypryk. In case that you want to detect relative changes in proteins related to immune response against any type of external agent, I would suggest you to perform an iITRAQ labeling (4-plex or 8-plex). After labeling you will be able to observe all relative changes in the proteins caused by the challenge. Then you need to see from all those proteins which are related to the immune response.

The impact of feeding certain pollen substitutes on maintaining the strength and productivity of honeybee colonies (Apis mellifera L.). Bulletin of Entomological Society of Egypt, Econ. Ser., 41: 63-74.

Please check this link for cross references.

Dear Koen,

Most probably it is a Rosaceae pollen and could be pollen of Crataegus or Prunus. I have already prepared modern pollen samples from Rosaceac- Creataegus collected from Zagros Mountains, Iran and its pollen looks like what you have posted here. Crataegus tree is a favorable source of nectar for Bumblebees.

Best

Hi,

See the links below.

Good luck. 

Simone has rightly mentioned. You have to analyse the pollen types through acetolysis technique. The purple pollen might be Mimosa pudica (small tetrad type, psilate) and the orange one may be Delonix regia (trizonocolpate/colporate, reticulate type with thick exine).

Dear Marpha, dear Imadeddin, thank you for your answers so far. Yes, plants (and other animals) were formed by the same selective forces, proximate explanations such as those on physiological level are also interesting. I am also absolutely convinced that the reaction is identical in case of natural/human-made smoke/fire. However, is there any mention in bee literature that this bee adaptation to fire/smoke is a natural, evolutionary adaptation to wildfires (thus older than relationship human-bee)? 

Many thanks once more time,

Martin

Sorry, I cannot.

Hi Lori,

Thanks for your willingness to help me. I am working on SHB population genetics. I have already received samples from Australia. I would be happy to get samples from other countries (Jamaica, Cuba...etc).

I agree wih  Indu Kumari completely. The presence of bee queen affects the wax secretion and comb building capacity of the workers by releasing pheromones to orginize and conrol all the work activities within the hive.

Hello,

Look up about detrending time series. Assuming monthly data, the simplest way is applying this multiple regression

yi = w₀ + w₁ t_i + w₂ sin(2πt_i / 12) + w₃ cos(2πt_i / 12) + ε_i

but, as Zivan said, it is difficult to say which would be the best model

Bye

Hola:

Como dice Mr. Sampson, la literatura esta muy dispersa a nivel de especie.

La segunda abeja, por su coloracion oscura, por sus alas claras y su tamaño grande en comparacion con otras Meliponas es mas o menos facil: Estamos entre M. fuliginosa o M. titania del grupo fuliginosa.

La otra es mas dificil y tocaria ver los ejemplares y compararlos con nuestra coleccion de referencia, pero de lejos parece una especie de Melipona del grupo eburnea aunque la coloracion de su pilosidad y de su integumento es bastante clara.  Yo diria que la taxonomia de muchos grupos de meliponinos aun esta en construccion. Una opinion mucho mas confiable que la mia la podrias obtener de la Profesora Guimar Nates de la UN-Colombia, del Dr. Ricardo Ayala de la UNAM o del Dr. Victor Hugo Gonzales de la U. Kansas.

thank you very much Chris. I will go through the paper and find some more information.

Cheers,

Giorgio

It is possible, but you need a good sampling of pollen source of plants that surrounding the experiment. You also need a good sample of individuals, for calculate the average proportion of pollen, and thus you will have an average closer to the reality of the different plant species and how much pollen of each species is being carried by honey bees.

Best regards

Cristian

PFA

Thank you for the information, Jorge.

Nice, thx a lot Sandra! ^^

Yes, I don't know your local species, but they are all flies.  The hoverflies (which most of these look like) are a wonderful group of little insects.  I find them almost every day in late summer on my plants (in Michigan in the U.S.).  They love, for instance, the asters.  They also mimic bees and there is one amazing one that mimics a wasp.  Here are some pictures.  I was photographing wasps on my goldenrod one day in September and right after snapping a picture this wasp came buzzing loudly around my head and shoulders.  I had to back away from it.  Later while cropping the day's pictures I laughed out loud - the wasp was a fly!  Your img 6021 looks a bit like our Rhingia nasica male. Your flesh-eaters (Sarcophagus) look so much like ours.  Welcome to fly lovers' club!

It very much depends on the way you plan to do the sampling, e.g. pan-trapping versus transect captures.  Some of the references in the attached might be helpful.

In August (peak period) the mean proportion of bees of one (41%), two (23%), three (17%), four (11%) and five (8%) week old bees did not differ between frames (10 frames per hive) (Research Vol. 51 (2) pp. 174 - 178, DOI:10.3896/IBRA.1.51.2.05).

This can give a rough estimate, but exactly the work based division of individual in different proportion to my knowledge is not known. Lot's of parameters and factors (internal and external) going to alter the proportion at a given time point. 

Really Interesting!!! Firstly how much? and then secondly how they monitor the exact numbers ? if any. 

The photograph of the bee is required for its identification.

Thanks Gurgen. Yes it is white crab spider. But further confirmation will be needed. I am trying to figure out the management/control of these spiders...

Hello Jason,

Honey combs have a magnificent characteristic: the wax absorbs most materials, including pesticides. I'm not absolutly sure about neonics, but it can be checked.

If  the honey is extracted in modern facilities, and if its filtered, the amount of wax in the honey will be so small that exposure to neonics is negligable. 

Bear in mind that we eat neonics in our fruits and vegtables, and if I'm not wrong, it contaminates our drinking water.

And so, honey should not be a major source for such exposures

Erez

Good ideas Peter! Why not also follow the causes for visiting various sources of pollen? Peters answer is somewhat restricted to pollen mixing during a single foaging trip, which might be caused by the rareness of some flowering plant species or signal standarsization (formerly Mullerian mimicry) in these plants. Recently Eckhardt M, Haider M, Dorn S & Müller A published an article termed Pollen mixing in pollen generalist solitary bees: a possible strategy to complement or mitigate unfavourable pollen properties? which arreared in J Anim Ecol. (2014) 83(3):588-97. doi: 10.1111/1365-2656.12168. showing that pollen mixing might be caused by toxic pollen. Other caused might be rareness of amino acids and other compounds in pollen of some plants. In these cases solitary bees are more affected than eusocial bees, the latter of which exhibit pollen mixing at the colony level.

This would not be an easy task if the honey is will filtrated, but if the honey do have incidents of being extracted in traditional methods then you might find small particles of the bees like parts of the legs and wings. and the would be on the upper layer of the honey jar. 

But this would be a very not easy task

With I.I.  we can create specific crosses that do not occur naturally. Also, virgins could be inseminated when drones are naturally unavailable by using stored semen . On contrary, generally the I.I. queen live shorter than those which mate naturally. Also, one may exclude some natural factors which may exclude inferior drones from superior ones.

Martinson, Vincent G., et al. "A simple and distinctive microbiota associated with honey bees and bumble bees." Molecular Ecology 20.3 (2011): 619-628.

Disayathanoowat, Terd, et al. "T-RFLP analysis of bacterial communities in the midguts of Apis mellifera and Apis cerana honey bees in Thailand." FEMS microbiology ecology 79.2 (2012): 273-281.

During the early pupation stage the queen is very delicate, perhaps the vertical orientation relieves pressure which would interfere with her development.

I think often the nectary itself/flower petals have yeasts and bacteria on, but it personally wouldn't surprise me if bees and flies and things brought in more. It sounds like a fairly straightforward experiment for a summer student, perhaps - could be nice to see it done!

The drone aggregation areas seem to depend on visual cues in the landscape.  I recommend - G. Koeniger, N. Koeniger, J. Ellis, and L. Connor . 2014.  Mating Biology of honey bees (Apis mellifera).  Wicwas Press.  pp. 155

The drones locate the queens by pheromone and by vision.  In trapping drones we use a dark target (queen sized) and Queen Mandibular Pheromone as the olfactory que.

Early work on synthetic pheromones was done by Keith N. Slessor, Lori-ann Kaminski, Gaylord G. S. King, John H. Borden, and Mark L. Winston; their work was patented in 1991. Synthetic queen mandibular pheromone (QMP) is a mixture of five components 9-ODA , (-) isomer (9-HDA), (+) isomer of (9-HDA), HOB and HVA in a ratio of 118:50:22:10:1.

These compounds are: 9-ox-2-decenoic acid (9ODA) + cis & trans 9 hydroxydec-2-enoic acid (9HDA) + methyl-p-hydroxybenzoate (HOB) and 4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenylethanol (HVA).

I don't think this is a very good paper to base these questions from because it is not intended to be a review of native pollinators in coffee systems. The paper by Ngo et al. might be a better place to start.

Yes it does...  interacts with some drugs  and with patients with Auto Immun disease

and with some patients with Helicobacter pylori... and in some anemia disorders

Hi

I think that the chromotrope 2R is suitable for microsporidia detection and diagnosis.

Regards

Dear Klaus,

According to my unpublished data, the ability of pollen germination decreases sharply after its placement in skopa. After that pollen is much stronger sterilized by bee female under the formation a pollen ball in the cell (probably by adding secretory substances). This prevents further germination of pollen in a cell, for not spoiling the food for larvae.

Best regards,

Vladimir.