How far can Melipona mandacaia (Hymenoptera, Apidae, Meliponini) foragers fly in a caatinga area of ne brazil?

Abstract

Influence of experience on homing ability of foragers of Melipona mandacaia Smith (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Meliponini) IntroductionStingless bees fly in order to collect the necessary food resources (pollen and nectar) and nest-building materials (resin, mud, etc.), and they need to travel certain distances for that (Roubik, 1989). In fact, bees are faced constantly with the task of navigating back to their nests from remote food sources and this is called 'homing ability'. Honey bees are the most studied bees concerning these aspects. They evolved several methods for doing this, such as compass-direct 'vector' flights, use of learned land marks, and cognitive maps based on spatial memory and on two dimensional snapshots of the surroundings (Anderson, 1977; Cartwright & Collet, 1981Gould, 1986;Capaldi & Dyer, 1999;Menzel et al., 2005;Menzel & Giurfa, 2006;Reynolds et al., 2007;Menzel et al., 2012;Cheeseman et al., 2014). Nevertheless, for stingless bees, up to the AbstractThe distance a bee can fly to collect food is quite relevant, among other aspects, for successful pollination. However, studies on this aspect concerning stingless bees usually do not take into consideration their homing ability. The objectives of this study were to verify the maximum distance that foragers of Melipona mandacaia Smith can fly, and whether experience is relevant for their homing ability in a Caatinga region of Northeast Brazil. Five colonies were used to collect foragers. These were marked and released starting from 100 m from their nests and at every 100 m up to a maximum distance on which there would be no bee returning to the nest. To evaluate the influence of experience, after being marked, another group of bees was put back into colonies, collected again after eight days and released in five distances only (500, 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 and 2,500 m). In both experiments, as the distance increased, the returning success of the bees decreased significantly. In fact, there was a significant negative correlation between their returning success and the distances they were released. The maximum distance a translocate bee returned to its hive was 2,700 m. The percentage of success was very high for bees released at 500 and 1,000 m (100% and 77%, respectively), suggesting this is the common flight range for the species. In most cases, average percentage of success was significantly higher for experienced bees than for other bees reinforcing the idea that experience is quite relevant for homing ability.

RFID-tagged amazonian stingless bees confirm that landscape configuration and nest re-establishment time affect homing ability

“…4), probably due to the greater number of disoriented bees, which took longer to return even at shorter distances. These results indicate the influence of colony experience (time in a given area) on the return capacity of M. seminigra workers, as observed for Apis mellifera (He et al 2013) and Melipona mandacaia (Rodrigues and Ribeiro 2014).…”

“…The colony is the center of the world of social bees, and workers leave it to go on foraging trips that can extend a few kilometers from their home (Capaldi and Dyer 1999;Nunes-Silva et al 2019;Pahl et al 2011;Rodrigues and Ribeiro 2014;Smith et al 2017). The flight capacity of bees is related to body size (Greenleaf et al 2007) and body measurements, such as head width (Nieuwstadt and Iraheta 1996), thorax width, and wing size (Araújo et al 2004), which are good predictors of flight capacity, even within the same species (Kuhn-Neto et al 2009).…”

“…This ability depends on the integration of memory with different sensory systems, such as magnetic field perception, sight, and smell (Chittka et al 1999;Heinze 2017;Menzel et al 2006Menzel et al , 1998. Some factors may influence the functioning of the homing ability of bees, such as experience (Capaldi and Dyer 1999;He et al 2013;Rodrigues and Ribeiro 2014) and environmental factors, for example, the presence and type of landmarks (Leonhardt et al 2016;Southwick and Buchmann 1995), pesticide contamination (Stanley et al 2016), diseases (Bordier et al 2017;Li et al 2013;Wolf et al 2014), and pests (Kralj and Fuchs 2006).…”

Bee Species, Botanical Sources and the Chemical Composition of Propolis from Yucatan, Mexico

“…Body size in A. mellifera and stingless bees has been related to their ability to collect pollen and nectar (Araújo et al 2004;Abou-Shaara 2014;Rodrigues and Ribeiro 2014). Presently, there is no information about bee flight ranges and their ability of resin foraging; assuming that a bigger body size could mean a higher ability to reach a larger diversity of resin sources, the differences in body size among the studied species could partially explain the differences found in the chemical composition of propolis.…”