“…It is the process by which the honey bee increases its chances of survival as a species [ 26 ]. Migration, on the other hand, refers to the movement of a honeybee colony across various biological zones [ 27 ]. The shortage of bee forage in this study is defined as the time when there is a shortage of plant flora in the areas.…”
“…It is the process by which the honey bee increases its chances of survival as a species [ 26 ]. Migration, on the other hand, refers to the movement of a honeybee colony across various biological zones [ 27 ]. The shortage of bee forage in this study is defined as the time when there is a shortage of plant flora in the areas.…”
“…We have mainly focused on communication about food sources, but social bees also communicate about water sources (for cooling), nest-building material, and nesting sites ( 16 , 22 , 27 , 83 ). Tropical honey bees, in particular, regularly relocate their nests, often in synchrony with flowering periods and rainy seasons ( 54 , 84 , 85 ). The benefits of these colony migrations in tropical honey bees could have been an additional factor selecting for the evolution of spatially explicit communication that allowed colonies to migrate efficiently toward a new nesting site ( 16 , 19 , 25 ).…”
Section: New Insights Into the Drivers Of Diversity In Communication ...mentioning
Communication is a fundamental feature of animal societies and helps their members to solve the challenges they encounter, from exploiting food sources to fighting enemies or finding a new home. Eusocial bees inhabit a wide range of environments and they have evolved a multitude of communication signals that help them exploit resources in their environment efficiently. We highlight recent advances in our understanding of bee communication strategies and discuss how variation in social biology, such as colony size or nesting habits, and ecological conditions are important drivers of variation in communication strategies. Anthropogenic factors, such as habitat conversion, climate change, or the use of agrochemicals, are changing the world bees inhabit, and it is becoming clear that this affects communication both directly and indirectly, for example by affecting food source availability, social interactions among nestmates, and cognitive functions. Whether and how bees adapt their foraging and communication strategies to these changes represents a new frontier in bee behavioral and conservation research.
“…Despite being one of the largest honeybees, they are much smaller when compared with the nocturnal carpenter bee, and hence likely to be severely limited in terms of the visual adaptations required for nocturnal colour vision [ 35 ]. Besides their facultative nocturnal behaviour, A. dorsata are open-nesting, building hives on tall cliffs, trees and on high-rise buildings in urban areas [ 40 – 42 ], which makes this species an ideal system to study the role of colour vision , especially the effect of increasing artificial light at night on colour perception and visual behaviour [ 43 , 44 ]. Figure 1 ( a,b ) An Apis dorsata forager and the experimental colony at IISER-TVM.…”
We discovered nocturnal colour vision in the Asian giant honeybee
Apis dorsata—
a facultatively nocturnal species
—
at mesopic light intensities, down to half-moon light levels (approx. 10
−2
cd m
−2
). The visual threshold of nocturnality aligns with their reported nocturnal activity down to the same light levels. Nocturnal colour vision in
A. dorsata
is interesting because, despite being primarily diurnal, its colour vision capabilities extend into dim light, while the ‘model’ European honeybee
Apis mellifera
is reported to be colour-blind at twilight. By employing behavioural experiments with naturally nesting
A. dorsata
colonies, we show discrimination of the trained colour from other stimuli during the day, and significantly, even at night. Nocturnal colour vision in bees has so far only been reported in the obligately nocturnal carpenter bee
Xylocopa tranquebarica.
The discovery of colour vision in these two bee species, despite differences in the extent of their nocturnality and the limitations of their apposition compound eye optics, opens avenues for future studies on visual adaptations for dim-light colour vision, their role in pollination of flowers at night, and the effect of light pollution on nocturnal activity in
A. dorsata,
a ubiquitous pollinator in natural, agricultural and urban habitats in the Asian tropics and sub-tropics.
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