Brood Rearing

Grüter, Christoph

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-60090-7_5

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 149 publications

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“…Mechanistically, this could be achieved by all females being fixed for a particular allele that would make them develop as queens with a particular probability [16,17]. This, however, does not preclude that nutritional factors could still play a role in intra-colony seasonal variation in queen production [41]. Such system could have evolved from dwarf queens, which are miniature queens reared from worker cells and are relatively common in stingless bees [42,43].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tragedy of the commons in Melipona bees revisited

et al. 2022

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Melipona stingless bees display a paradoxical overproduction of queens, which are later eliminated by nest-mate workers. Mechanistically, it was suggested that the monoterpenoid geraniol deposited into newly provisioned cells by adult bees would cause larvae to develop into queens in Melipona beecheii . This system could be evolutionarily stable if many of these new queens were to leave the nest and parasitize other genetically unrelated colonies nearby, as was shown to occur in a congeneric species . Here, we use microsatellite markers to test whether queen overproduction could be a strategy by which adult workers control the caste fate of the developing larvae to export copies of their own genes to the rest of the population via queen parasitism in M. beecheii . In addition, we re-examined whether artificially increasing the levels of geraniol indeed caused larvae to develop as queens rather than workers. Contrary to our prediction, we found no evidence for queen parasitism in M. beecheii and observed no effect of geraniol on the rearing of new queens. Together, these results support the original ‘tragedy of the commons' hypothesis for queen overproduction in Melipona bees, where individual larvae selfishly bias their development towards the queen pathway according to their best evolutionary interests.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tragedy of the commons in Melipona bees revisited

et al. 2022

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“…It is also likely that a parameter's relevance (not just its healthy value range) may vary between bee species. For instance, monitoring for the loss of a stingless bee hive's queen may be less valuable as an indicator of concern than in the case of a honey bee hive, since stingless bees naturally create more queens [Grüter, 2020a].…”

Section: Hive Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Framework for Better Sensor-Based Beehive Health Monitoring

Zaman

Dorin

2022

Preprint

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Hive bees provide essential pollination services to human agriculture. Managed honey bees in particular pollinate many crops, but also create honey and other bee products that are now of global economic importance. Key aspects of honey bee behaviour can be understood by observing hives. Hence, the limitations of manual observation are increasingly being addressed by new technologies that automate and extend the reach of hive monitoring. Here we propose a framework to classify and clarify the potential for sensor-assisted hive monitoring to inform apiculture and, ultimately, improve hive bee management. This framework considers hive monitoring approaches across three newly proposed categories: Operational monitoring, Investigative monitoring, and Predictive monitoring. These categories constitute a new ``OIP Framework'' of hive monitoring. Each category has its own requirements for underlying technology that includes sensors and ICT resources we outline. Each category is associated with particular outcomes and benefits for apiculture and hive health monitoring detailed here. Application of these three classes of sensor-assisted hive monitoring can simplify understanding and improve best-practice management of hive bees. Our survey and classification of hive monitoring to date show that it is seldom practiced beyond honey bees, despite the need to understand bumble bees and stingless bees also. Perhaps unsurprisingly, sensor-based hive monitoring is shown to remain primarily a practice of developed nations. Yet we show how all countries, especially developing nations, stand to gain substantially from the benefits improved sensor-based hive monitoring offers. These include a better understanding of environmental change, an increased ability to manage pollination, an ability to respond rapidly to hive health issues such as pests and pathogens, and even an ability to react quickly to the danger posed to insects and humans alike by extreme events such as floods and fires. Finally, we anticipate that the future of hive monitoring lies in the application of Predictive monitoring, such that a hive's anticipated future state can be preemptively managed by beekeepers working iteratively with novel hive monitoring technologies.

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Brood Rearing

Cited by 2 publications

References 149 publications

Tragedy of the commons in Melipona bees revisited

Tragedy of the commons in Melipona bees revisited

A Framework for Better Sensor-Based Beehive Health Monitoring

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