We know that stinging is a defensive behavior for honey bees. Some species and breeds of honey bees go about that defensive reaction across a spectrum of aggressiveness. While some are relatively docile or low key to get “fired up”, others are on a seeming hair trigger to explosive response.
What are the determining factors to how aggressively a given type of honey bee or breed of bee will respond? Are they genetic, chemical, or behavioral? Some some combination of some of all of the above.
Someone is looking into the subject and may bee trying to breed a different type of bee based on that.
(Inside Science) — James Nieh, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, has been studying bees for decades. He’s often a go-to expert on bees.“I often get people who ask me, ‘what about those killer bees, those Africanized bees?’ And it turns out that these guys are beneficial in the environment for a variety of reasons, beneficial in the sense that they do better than the European honeybee,” said Nieh.
Honey bee nutrition is always a topic of great concern for keepers of bees. Seasonal changes in mineral needs for the colony are important, especially as we work to prepare hives for annual weather events such as Winter or other environmental shifts such as dealing with dearth due to intense heat. Of course, for migratory apiarists and those with stationary bee yards in more “challenging” locations that are sometimes referred to as “food deserts”, maintaining healthy bee colony nutrition becomes even more of a concern.
Hmm, but as this article goes on to show, the more information we find about bees, the more questions we have.
MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE (February 9, 2017) – Despite having few taste genes, honey bees are fine-tuned to know what minerals the colony may lack and proactively seek out nutrients in conjunction with the season when their floral diet varies. This key finding from a new study led by Tufts University scientists sheds light on limited research on the micronutrient requirements of honey bees, and provides potentially useful insight in support of increased health of the bee population, which has declined rapidly in recent years for a variety of complex reasons.
Some lab studies but almost no field studies suggest neonicotinoid pesticides are harming bee health. Why is there such a gap in conclusions? And why are field studies virtually ignored in the media, while one-off lab studies hinting at catastrophe are circulated widely?
“This variation of the reproductive ground plan hypothesis suggests division of labor – the ways social bees cooperate to complete all tasks necessary to keep the colony running – evolved from ancestral gene networks that function to align a female’s dietary preferences with the nutrients she needs during different phases of her reproductive cycle,” says Kapheim,