The foraging behaviour of honey bees, Apis mellifera: a review

Abstract

Foraging behaviour is one of the distinctive behaviours of honey bees, Apis mellifera. This behaviour is the link between the honey bee colony and the ambient environment. Therefore, various in-colony and out-colony factors have an impact on this behaviour, and many studies have been employed to investigate these factors. Foraging behaviour is not advantageous only for the colony and for plant pollination but also has other benefits. In contrast, some disadvantages have also been discovered to be linked with foraging activity. Practically speaking, the control over this behaviour is very important to maximize colony products as well as to increase other agricultural benefits. This paper presents a review on foraging activity including; the regulation of foraging tasks, factors impacting this behaviour, foraging preference, variations between subspecies, monitoring methods as well as the possible methods for controlling this behaviour. As concluded from this review, more work needs to be performed in order to elucidate certain aspects of foraging behaviour.

Widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early Neolithic farmers

“…The lack of evidence for beeswax use at Neolithic sites north of the 57th parallel North may suggest an ecological limit to the natural occurrence of honeybees. Indeed, harsh high latitude conditions, even with temper atures warmer than today 29 , would affect the foraging capabilities of honeybees 30 . Critically, in the absence of a Holocene fossil record for A. mellifera 7 these findings provide the first ancient biomolecule based palaeoecological map of the distribution of an economically and cul turally important animal (Fig.…”

Multi Dimensional Honey Bee Foraging Algorithm Based on Optimal Energy Consumption

“…Minimum energy will be consumed when transporting high quality food from a shorter distance. Minimum energy consumption will lead to maximum profitability [11]. The factors that affect energy consumption of forager bees are the distance between the source and the destination, food quality, food quantity, weather and temperature.…”

“…Transportation problem is a linear programming model with linear objective functions and constraints [11]. It is based on supply and demand of commodities transported between multiple sources and destinations.…”

Pollen Bearing Honey Bee Detection in Hive Entrance Video Recorded by Remote Embedded System for Pollination Monitoring

“…Much effort is invested in understanding honey bees behavior. Number of honey bees entering and leaving the , as well as their movement have been investigated for a long time, but mostly through manual data collection and randomly through time (Abou-Shaara, 2014) and (Delaplane, 2013). In (Delaplane, 2013), standard methods for estimation of strength of honey bee colonies are described.…”