The honeybee brain hosts over 600,000 neurons, at a density higher than that of mammalian brains:
"Our estimate of total brain cell number for the European honeybee (Apis mellifera;
≈ 6.13 × 10^5, s = 1.28 × 10^5; ...) was lower than the existing estimate from brain sections ≈ 8.5 × 10^5"
"the highest neuron densities have been found in the smallest respective species examined (smoky shrews in mammals; 2.08 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [14] and goldcrests in birds; 4.9 × 10^5 neurons mg^−1 [16]). The Hymenoptera in our sample have on average higher cell densities than vertebrates (5.94 × 10^5 cells mg^−1; n = 30 species)."
Ants, on the other hand ...
"ants stand out from bees and wasps as having particularly small brains by measures of mass and cell number."
Not sure who needs to hear this... but... honey bees throughout the world are an invasive species. They are only native to Europe. Stop trying to save invasive species!
From Thomas Seeley's "Honeybee democracy" https://archive.org/details/honeybeedemocrac0000seel (can be borrowed for free online at the @scholar ) with stories about his lab and early PhD work studying how bee scouts communicate and a swarm decides to move to a new home, including summaries from earlier, pioneering work by Martin Lindauer, to now Anna Hadjitofi and Barbara Webb https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982224002203 figuring out how a worker bee reads out the waggle dance from scouts and foragers. Quite the journey.
Every year, the bloom of thousands of almond trees in California spurs one of the world’s largest, albeit artificial, migrations of animals; as billions of #honeybees are loaded onto trucks and sent to deliver lucrative pollination fees for their human keepers.
This insect odyssey ensures paydays for often struggling beekeepers, the production of most of the world’s almonds, and increasingly, an opportunity for enterprising thieves.
Standing in the way of the bee rustlers — often alone — is #Rowdy#Freeman, a deputy at the Butte County Sheriff’s Office in California’s Central Valley.
Freeman is a steely sort of bee detective. Angular, with a shaved head and fond of wearing wrap-around sunglasses, the taciturn deputy is a beekeeper himself and is aghast at how hive thefts have become so ubiquitous.
Last year, according to Freeman calculations, a record of more than 🔸2,300 honeybee hives were stolen in the Central Valley🔸.
This year’s thefts could easily surpass that number, with Freeman recording nearly 2,000 hives stolen already.
Despite the growing scale of this crime, Freeman is typically the only law enforcement officer working with beekeepers to track the stolen hives and their thieves.
“I’m trying to get more help for this because it’s become a major problem, it’s getting out of control,” Freeman said.
While California has state branches devoted to stamping out the theft of #horses or #cattle, no such task force exists for bees, he notes with no small amount of envy and frustration.
The federal government is also uninterested in the issue, despite what Freeman describes as clear-cut evidence that stolen hives have been transported over state lines @thebeeguy @ai6yr @firephoto
🐝🐝🐝 "...today we bring you a story not of divisive politics but of a remarkable recovery. The bees are coming back. And folks, this is a very big deal."
--Dan Rather
The supplemental data has a captivating set of photographs of bees inside the hive, highlighting their head and antennae positions, and documenting trophalaxis (passing food onto each other).
"From time to time there is a news story about a person or organisation “helping the endangered honey bee” by placing hives on city roofs, for example. Our review provides further evidence that the honey bee is in fact exceedingly abundant" #Bees#HoneyBees#WildBees
First honeybee of the season on today’s beautiful morning, foraging on nearby crocus and other flowers emerging from long dormant bulbs. This ‘flower’ though wasn’t tasty, only colourful and warmed by the sun.
Digital bees: "As BrainScaleS-2 emulates neural processes 1000 times faster than biology, 4800 consecutive bee journeys distributed over 320 generations occur within only half an hour on a single neuromorphic core."
"This book focuses on what I believe is the most wondrous example of how the multitude of bees in a hive, much like the multitude of cells in a body, work together without an overseer to create a functional unit whose abilities far transcend those of its constituents."
"Tyramine and its Amtyr1 receptor modulate attention in honey bees (Apis mellifera)", Latshaw et al. 2013 (Brian Smith's lab). https://elifesciences.org/articles/83348
Genetics and crosses in honeybees: the patience to do these experiments is admirable. Plus electrophysiology!
We are in October but the hard cold hasn't hit yet and on sunny days like this one was, the bees are frantically busy, lining up for a feed, like Grand Central Station at the ticket counter.