Related GMR Articles
The superiority of Africanized over European honey bees in tropical and subtropical regions of the New World is both well documented and poorly understood. As part of an effort to try to understand the process by which the displacement of European bees occurred, we examined the ability of these two types of bees and of hybrids between the two to convert natural and artificial diets into ... more
There has been much speculation about which phenotypic traits serve as reliable indicators of productivity in queen honeybees (Apis mellifera). To investigate the predictive value of queen body weight on colony development and quality, we compared colonies in which queens weighed less than 180 mg to those in which queens weighed more than 200 mg. Both groups contained naturally ... more
The continuous trait age at subsequent rebreeding (ASR) was evaluated using survival analysis in Nellore breed cows that conceived for the first time at approximately 14 months of age. This methodology was chosen because the restricted breeding season produces censored data. The dataset contained 2885 records of ASR (in days). Records of females that did not produce calves in the ... more
We report nuclear acid phosphatase activity in the somatic (intra-ovariolar and stromatic) and germ cells of differentiating honey bee worker ovaries, as well as in the midgut cells of metamorphosing bees. There was heterogeneity in the intensity and distribution of electron dense deposits of lead phosphate, indicative of acid phosphatase activity in the nuclei of these tissues, during ... more
A comparison of the most conserved sex-determining genes between the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, and the honey bee, Apis mellifera, was performed with bioinformatics tools developed for computational molecular biology. An initial set of protein sequences already described in the fruit fly as participants of the sex-determining cascade was retrieved from the Gene ... more
Most research on hygienic behavior has recorded the time taken by the colony to remove an experimental amount of dead brood, usually after one or two days. We evaluated the time that hygienic (H) and non-hygienic (NH) honey bees take to uncap and remove dead brood in observation hives after the brood was killed using the pin-killing assay. Four experimental colonies were selected as ... more
In Apis mellifera, hygienic behavior involves recognition and removal of sick, damaged or dead brood from capped cells. We investigated whether bees react in the same way to grouped versus isolated damaged capped brood cells. Three colonies of wild-type Africanized honey bees and three colonies of Carniolan honey bees were used for this investigation. Capped worker brood cells aged 12 ... more
The hygienic behavior of honey bees is based on a two-step process, including uncapping and removing diseased, dead, damaged, or parasitized brood inside the cell. We evaluated during periods of 1 h the time that hygienic and non-hygienic colonies of Africanized honey bees spend to detect, uncap and remove pin-killed brood using comb inserts with transparent walls placed in observation hives. ... more
Though the replacement of European bees by Africanized honey bees in tropical America has attracted considerable attention, little is known about the temporal changes in morphological and genetic characteristics in these bee populations. We examined the changes in the morphometric and genetic profiles of an Africanized honey bee population collected near where the original African swarms ... more
Pollen substitute diets are a valuable resource for maintaining strong and health honey bee colonies. Specific diets may be useful in one region or country and inadequate or economically unviable in others. We compared two artificial protein diets that had been formulated from locally-available ingredients in Brazil with bee bread and a non-protein sucrose diet. Groups of 100 newly- ... more