Search Results

Supporters of WikiLeaks proprietor Julian Assange protested his arrest in Sweden on sexual charges as a classic “honey trap”—a sting operation in which an attractive person is used to entrap or coerce a target. In this case, the claim is that two Swedish women used sex as a way of trapping Assange. “Honey trap” is a phrase more familiar in Britain than the United States, and its connection with sting seems more than coincidental. The honeybee has long been associated in literature and political philosophy with a model of human society—from Virgil's Georgics to Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees to Leo Tolstoy and Karl Marx. But although the term “honey trap” was originally associated with espionage, the Oxford English Dictionary says that it is now onw which is found “especially in journalism.”

This chapter considers pollination by bees, or melittophily. The bee flower syndrome involves flowers that have medium to long corolla tubes, often pendant, usually zygomorphic (i.e., bilaterally symmetrical rather than radial), commonly with a landing platform with complex texture or ridging so that a bee can hang on easily, and often arranged in spiked inflorescences. The flowers typically open in the early morning and offer their main rewards before midday, although a few are particularly rewarding in the evenings. The chapter begins with a discussion of the bee’s feeding apparatus and feeding methods, along with sensory systems and bee perception of flowers. It then examines the effects of sociality on bees’ flower-visiting patterns as well as behavior and learning in flower-visiting bees. Finally, it analyzes six melittophily types namely: solitary bees, carpenter bees, euglossine bees, bumblebees, stingless bees, and honeybees.

This chapter compares the Drosophila group with mosquitoes and honeybees to disentangle common themes from specific components of immunity. Honeybees, for example, have a relatively small set of immune genes which demonstrate a high degree of conservatism. They are most intriguing when compared with non-social insects, as the differences between them are attributable to the evolution of sociality in bees and other Hymenoptera. The chapter highlights how the use of comparative genomics led to the unravelling of evolutionary novelties. Genes containing leucine-rich repeats are an example, which led to the discovery of a new complement-like mechanism in mosquitoes.

This chapter explores honeybee vision and provides a captivating window into the bizarre world seen through compound eyes using both behavioral and neurobiological evidence. Far from being a pattern perception device, bee vision destroys the pattern in the image and replaces it by the layout of a few labels. Bee vision is a set of coincidences like the contributions of numerous molecules to the flavor of a soup or the smell of coffee. Moreover, vision is not a separated modality, as it is in humans, for there are neurons that respond to other modalities in the bee optic lobe, and the visual cues are linked to odors and the time of day.

Honeybees navigate and communicate in the context of foraging and nest selection. This chapter presents a novel technique (harmonic radar tracking) that has been applied to foraging behavior. On the basis of the data collected, a concept that assumes an integrated map-like structure of spatial memory has been developed. Characteristic features (long-ranging landmarks) and local characteristics are learned during exploratory flights. Route flights and information about target destinations transferred during the waggle dance are integrated into the map-like memory, enabling bees to make novel short-cutting flights between learned and communicated locations and to perform decisions about their flight routes. Cognitive terminology is applied to describe these implicit knowledge properties in bee navigation.

In this chapter, we draw from our three-year multispecies ethnography of urban beekeeping conducted in New York City amidst bees and their human caretakers. Our fieldwork began with urban beekeepers, our primary key informants who introduced us to rooftop hives and colonies located near clogged expressways. We quickly became acutely aware of our other nonhuman informants who populated the field and challenged our senses—thousands of insects that careened and whirled around our bodies; buzzing vibrantly in our ears, stinging us, landing quietly on our skin. In this light, our fieldwork and analyses pay particular attention to the everyday lives of the bee, attempting to decenter our human selves in the process—to become more animal in our intra-actions with bees—becoming with them instead of becoming as distinct from them. This requires that as fieldworkers, we interrupt our tendency to think of bees as the object of study and that we resist thinking of ourselves or the beekeepers as static, bounded, and permanently fixed entities. Instead we need to see all—ourselves, bees, the beekeepers, and other objects—as matter that is in the world and with politically fraught boundaries that are created through entanglements and conflicts.

The mechanistic research on animal learning and memory is typically conducted under the necessary controlled laboratory conditions using a few animal species whose ecology and behavior in the wild are not well known. A notable exception is the honeybee, Apis mellifera, which has been studied extensively in this chapter. The authors illustrate the honeybee as an ideal model system for integrating mechanistic knowledge on genes, neurons, and hormones with whole-animal information on behavior and ecology. Though the chapter focuses on studies of the honeybee, experience-dependent brain plasticity is not a rare phenomenon. A behavioral neuroscientist can be confident that it is happening in the animal model. Association of the experience-dependent changes in brain structure to their functional consequences is important because doing so will provide an insight into a powerful source of individual (experience-dependent) differences in animal behavior.

An altruistic act is one in which an individual incurs a cost that results in a benefit to others. Giving money or time to those less fortunate than ourselves is one example, as is giving up one’s seat on a bus. At first, one might consider such behaviour hopelessly naive in a world in which natural selection seemingly rewards selfishness in the competitive struggle for existence. As the saying goes, ‘nice guys finish last’. Yet examples of apparent altruism are commonplace. Meerkats will spend hours in the baking sun keeping lookout for predators that might attack their colony mates. Vampire bats will regurgitate blood to feed their starving roost fellows, while baboons will take the time and effort to groom other baboons. Some individuals, such as honeybee workers, forego their own reproduction to help their queen and will even die in her defence. The common gut bacterium Escherichia coli commits suicide when it is infected by a bacteriophage, thereby protecting its clones from being infected. If helping incurs a cost, then surely an individual that accepts a cooperative act yet gives nothing in return would do better than cooperators? What, then, allows these cases of apparent altruism to persist? In his last presidential address to the Royal Society of London in November 2005, Robert M. May argued, ‘The most important unanswered question in evolutionary biology, and more generally in the social sciences, is how cooperative behaviour evolved and can be maintained’. In this chapter, we document a number of examples of cooperation in the natural world and ask how it is maintained despite the obvious evolutionary pressure to ‘cheat’. We will see that, while it is tempting to see societies as some form of higher organism, to fully understand cooperation, it helps to take a more reductionist view of the world, frequently a gene-centred perspective. Indeed, thinking about altruism has led to one of the greatest triumphs of the ‘selfish gene’ approach, namely the theory of kin selection. Ultimately, as the quote from Mandeville indicates, we will see that cooperation frequently arises simply out of pure self-interest—it just so happens that individuals (or, more precisely, genes) in the business of helping themselves sometimes help others.

In this chapter, the semantics of three honeybee words from the Dravidian language Solega is discussed, with particular attention paid to methodological issues. These include sourcing naturalistic data for an under-described language, and objectively determining the boundary between core meaning elements and peripheral encyclopedic knowledge. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) explications for perceptually similar honeybees are presented, with notes on challenging issues, such as unambiguously placing the honeybees along a gradient of physical size, as well as incorporating information on ecological relationships between honeybees and other named species. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the Solega folk taxonomy of honeybees.

How far down the phylogenetic scale does consciousness descend? Is it limited to mammals and other vertebrates, or can it be found in invertebrates as well? This chapter extends the framework developed in the first few chapters to honeybees and other insects, and also to hermit crabs, another kind of arthropod, in order to answer this difficult question. In light of recent scientific experiments, there is a good case to be made that hermit crabs can feel pain and that honeybees are capable of emotional experiences such as anxiety. Experiences, it seems, are not restricted to the realm of vertebrates.