Apis florea workers show a prolonged period of nursing behavior

Abstract

Studies on behavioral maturation and division of labor in open-nesting honey bee species are scarce as the bee curtain inhibits direct examination of intranidal behaviors. We observed and studied nursing behavior in Apis florea by attaching a foreign comb with open brood to a host colony. Several of the workers that explored the attached comb visited the cells with brood more often and spent more time in cells compared to empty cells. Workers seen inspecting and feeding the brood had well-developed hypopharyngeal glands compared to foragers of their own colony indicating that they are nurses performing nursing behavior. Further, introducing marked 1-day-old workers into the host colony and repeatedly attaching combs with open brood allowed us to estimate the age range of nursing behavior. In our experiments, A. florea workers started to perform significant nursing behavior 8 days after eclosion and continued to show nursing behavior until the age of 28 days, the end of our observation period. Thus, nursing behavior in A. florea appears to be substantially extended relative to A. mellifera .

Metabolic scaling as an emergent outcome of variation in metabolic rate

“…In honeybees, interspecific differences in metabolic rate are strongly associated with differences in nesting habit and correlated differences in worker tempo. The workers of the two cavity-nesting, high tempo species Apis mellifera and Apis cerana have significantly higher metabolic rates than workers of the two open-nesting, low tempo species, Apis florea and Apis dorsata , a pattern that also extends to the colony level [105] and lines up with several behavioural and life-history differences, but not with body size, along expected lines [106]. This independence of interspecific differences in metabolic rate from differences in body size, which is a departure from the allometric principle of metabolic scaling, strongly points to the important role of ecology (nesting habit in this case) and other top-down factors acting at a higher level of organization (the colony in this case) in shaping the metabolic rate of lower-level units.…”

Conserved hormonal and molecular mechanisms underlying behavioural maturation in open- and cavity-nesting honey bees

“…(ii) Nurse-Forager comparison: Individual nurse bees and foragers were collected from 6 colonies each of A. cerana (5 frames each) and A. florea based on the tasks they were observed to be performing irrespective of their age. Nurses were identified as those bees that inserted their heads into cells containing larvae [54][55][56][57]. Foragers were identified based on the fact that they had pollen load when returning to the colony.…”