ApinewsNews about bees and beekeeping from around the world

The first hard evidence of what is happening physiologically inside bees during Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has been published in a new study by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and University of Illinois scientists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study also looked at differences in activity levels of critical genes in CCD and healthy bee colonies.

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A new study reveals that changes in gene expression in the brain of the honey bee in response to an immediate threat have much in common with more long-term and even evolutionary differences in honey-bee aggression. The findings lend support to the idea that nurture (an organism’s environment) may ultimately influence nature (its genetic inheritance).

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Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists have sequenced the genome of a parasite that can kill honey bees. Nosema ceranae is one of many pathogens suspected of contributing to the current bee population decline, termed colony collapse disorder (CCD).

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Australia should engineer a special bee to be resistant to the destructive varroa mite to preserve its honey and pollination industries, says a leading entomologist.

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University of California Davis bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey and Steve Sheppard, a professor and apiculturist at Washington State University, Pullman, Wash., are investigating several races of the Western or European honey bee (Apis mellifera), which European settlers brought to America in 1622.

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The contentious debate about why insects evolved to put the interests of the colony over the individual has been re-ignited by new research from the University of Leeds, showing that they do so to increase the chances that their genes will be passed on.

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Students of the evolution of social behavior got a big boost with the publication of the newly sequenced honeybee genome in October 2006.

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With funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service, researchers at the University of Illinois developed and distributed a microarray of the honeybee genome, which will enhance and accelerate research on the honeybee genome.

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Though you may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, ASU researchers have found that evolution may have taught old genes new tricks in the development of social behavior in honeybees.

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Here is an interesting article by Carl Zimmer about the sequencing of the honeybee genome.

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