Navigation and Communication in Honey Bees

Menzel, Randolf; Fuchs, Joseph R.; Kirbach, Andreas; Lehmann, Konstantin; Greggers, Uwe

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-2099-2_9

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…In contrast, essentially, no drifting of drones was found among colonies in the dispersed group, which were housed in hives that were identical to those in the crowded group but were spaced more widely. The mechanisms by which a drone bee finds his way home on a mating flight have not been studied, but probably they match those used by a worker bee to orient home on a foraging flight: use of dead reckoning and perhaps a cognitive map to return to the correct general area (Wehner 1992;Menzel et al 2012) and then use of snapshot memories of local landmarks (Collett and Graham 2004) and possibly use of social cues (such as bee flight traffic) to pinpoint the hive entrance. It now seems clear that when we humans house bees in identical hives placed close together and facing the same direction, we create an Bevolutionary trap^for the bees, that is, an environment in which the physical and social cues that an animal uses to solve a problem are altered, rendering the animal prone to make decision errors (Schlaepfer et al 2002).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crowding honeybee colonies in apiaries can increase their vulnerability to the deadly ectoparasite Varroa destructor

2015

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-When humans switched from hunting honeybee colonies living scattered in the wild to keeping them in hives crowded in apiaries, they may have greatly increased disease transmission between colonies. The effects of clustering colonies were studied. Two groups of 12 colonies, with hives crowded or dispersed, were established in a common environment and left untreated for mites. Drones made many homing errors in the crowded group, but not in the dispersed group. In early summer, in both groups, the colonies that did not swarm developed high mite counts, but the colonies that swarmed maintained low mite counts. In late summer, in the crowded group but not in the dispersed group, the colonies that swarmed also developed high mite counts. All colonies with high mite counts in late summer died over winter; all colonies with low mite counts in late summer survived over winter. Evidently, swarming can reduce a colony's mite load, but when colonies are crowded in apiaries, this mite-load reduction is erased as mites are spread through drifting and robbing. apiary / Apis mellifera / crowding / drifting / evolutionary trap / parasitism / Varroa destructor

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crowding honeybee colonies in apiaries can increase their vulnerability to the deadly ectoparasite Varroa destructor

2015

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“…During exploratory orientation flights, honeybees become familiar with the sun compass, measurement of distances and landmarks [49,50]. Further information about the landscape is added during flights between the hive and the feeding sites.…”

Section: Homeward Flights After Feeding From Resources Containing mentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of the Herbicide Glyphosate on Honey Bee Sensory and Cognitive Abilities: Individual Impairments with Implications for the Hive

Farina

Balbuena

Herbert

et al. 2019

Insects

102

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The honeybee Apis mellifera is an important pollinator in both undisturbed and agricultural ecosystems. Its great versatility as an experimental model makes it an excellent proxy to evaluate the environmental impact of agrochemicals using current methodologies and procedures in environmental toxicology. The increase in agrochemical use, including those that do not target insects directly, can have deleterious effects if carried out indiscriminately. This seems to be the case of the herbicide glyphosate (GLY), the most widely used agrochemical worldwide. Its presence in honey has been reported in samples obtained from different environments. Hence, to understand its current and potential risks for this pollinator it has become essential to not only study the effects on honeybee colonies located in agricultural settings, but also its effects under laboratory conditions. Subtle deleterious effects can be detected using experimental approaches. GLY negatively affects associative learning processes of foragers, cognitive and sensory abilities of young hive bees and promotes delays in brood development. An integrated approach that considers behavior, physiology, and development allows not only to determine the effects of this agrochemical on this eusocial insect from an experimental perspective, but also to infer putative effects in disturbed environments where it is omnipresent.

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“…This kind of problemsolving ability is abundant in nature. Two well-known examples are the shortest path finding by swarms of ants (3) and collective selection of profitable food resources by honeybees through waggle dances (4).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minimal navigation solution for a swarm of tiny flying robots to explore an unknown environment

et al. 2019

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Swarms of tiny flying robots hold great potential for exploring unknown, indoor environments. Their small size allows them to move in narrow spaces, and their light weight makes them safe for operating around humans. Until now, this task has been out of reach due to the lack of adequate navigation strategies. The absence of external infrastructure implies that any positioning attempts must be performed by the robots themselves. State-of-the-art solutions, such as simultaneous localization and mapping, are still too resource demanding. This article presents the swarm gradient bug algorithm (SGBA), a minimal navigation solution that allows a swarm of tiny flying robots to autonomously explore an unknown environment and subsequently come back to the departure point. SGBA maximizes coverage by having robots travel in different directions away from the departure point. The robots navigate the environment and deal with static obstacles on the fly by means of visual odometry and wall-following behaviors. Moreover, they communicate with each other to avoid collisions and maximize search efficiency. To come back to the departure point, the robots perform a gradient search toward a home beacon. We studied the collective aspects of SGBA, demonstrating that it allows a group of 33-g commercial off-the-shelf quadrotors to successfully explore a real-world environment. The application potential is illustrated by a proof-of-concept search-and-rescue mission in which the robots captured images to find “victims” in an office environment. The developed algorithms generalize to other robot types and lay the basis for tackling other similarly complex missions with robot swarms in the future.

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Navigation and Communication in Honey Bees

Cited by 11 publications

References 44 publications

Crowding honeybee colonies in apiaries can increase their vulnerability to the deadly ectoparasite Varroa destructor

Crowding honeybee colonies in apiaries can increase their vulnerability to the deadly ectoparasite Varroa destructor

Effects of the Herbicide Glyphosate on Honey Bee Sensory and Cognitive Abilities: Individual Impairments with Implications for the Hive

Minimal navigation solution for a swarm of tiny flying robots to explore an unknown environment

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