Tropical and montane Apis cerana show distinct dance-distance calibration curves.

Social bees have evolved sophisticated communication systems to recruit nestmates to newly found food sources. As foraging ranges can vary from a few hundred meters to several kilometers depending on the environment or season, populations of social bee species living in different climate zones likely show specific adaptations in their recruitment communication. Accordingly, studies in the western honey bee, Apis mellifera, demonstrated that temperate populations exhibit shallower dance-calibration curves compared with tropical populations.

Diverse communication strategies in bees as a window into adaptations to an unpredictable world.

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.

Distance estimation by Asian honey bees in two visually different landscapes.

Honey bees estimate distances to food sources using image motion experienced on the flight path and they use this measure to tune the waggle phase duration in their dance communication. Most studies on the dance-related odometer are based on experiments with foragers trained into small tunnels with black and white patterns which allowed quantifiable changes in the optic flow. In this study, we determined the calibration curves of two Asian honey bee species, and , in two different natural environments with clear differences in the vegetation conditions and hence visual contrast.

Adaptive evolution of honeybee dance dialects.

Efficient communication is highly important for the evolutionary success of social animals. Honeybees (genus ) are unique in that they communicate the spatial information of resources using a symbolic 'language', the waggle dance. Different honeybee species differ in foraging ecology but it remains unknown whether this shaped variation in the dance.

Inter-individual variation in honey bee dance intensity correlates with expression of the foraging gene.

Individual behavioural differences in responding to the same stimuli is an integral part of division of labour in eusocial insect colonies. Amongst honey bee nectar foragers, individuals strongly differ in their sucrose responsiveness, which correlates with strong differences in behavioural decisions. In this study, we explored whether the mechanisms underlying the regulation of foraging are linked to inter-individual differences in the waggle dance activity of honey bee foragers.

Honey bees flexibly use two navigational memories when updating dance distance information.

Honey bees can communicate navigational information which makes them unique amongst all prominent insect navigators. Returning foragers recruit nest mates to a food source by communicating flight distance and direction using a small scale walking pattern: the waggle dance. It is still unclear how bees transpose flight information to generate corresponding dance information.

Explaining the atypical reaction profiles of heme enzymes with a novel mechanistic hypothesis and kinetic treatment.

Many heme enzymes show remarkable versatility and atypical kinetics. The fungal extracellular enzyme chloroperoxidase (CPO) characterizes a variety of one and two electron redox reactions in the presence of hydroperoxides. A structural counterpart, found in mammalian microsomal cytochrome P450 (CYP), uses molecular oxygen plus NADPH for the oxidative metabolism (predominantly hydroxylation) of substrate in conjunction with a redox partner enzyme, cytochrome P450 reductase.