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Concept

Western honey bee

Related publications (11)

Targeted worker removal reveals a lack of flexibility in brood transport specialisation with no compensatory gain in efficiency

Mahmut Selman Sakar, Laurent Keller, Fazil Emre Uslu

Division of labour is widely thought to increase the task efficiency of eusocial insects. Workers can switch their task to compensate for sudden changes in demand, providing flexible task allocation. In combination with automated tracking technology, we de ...

Nature Research2024

A Biohybrid Superorganism - Investigating honeybees' collective behaviors via interactive robotics

Rafael Botner Barmak

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where the collaborative efforts of "simple" individuals can lead to the emergence of complex dynamics. The reliance of each organism on the collective is so great t ...

EPFL2024

Host-derived organic acids enable gut colonization of the honey bee symbiont Snodgrassella alvi

Anders Meibom, Stéphane Laurent Escrig, Christel Genoud

Diverse bacteria can colonize the animal gut using dietary nutrients or by engaging in microbial crossfeeding interactions. Less is known about the role of host-derived nutrients in enabling gut bacterial colonization. Here we examined metabolic interactio ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Architecture of a decentralised decision support system for futuristic beehives

Francesco Mondada, Robert Thomas Edmund Mills, Robert Matthew Mills

Honeybees are essential to human society, providing pollination services globally as well as producing honey and other valuable products. Effective management of apiaries should not only rely on beekeeper knowledge and skill, but also incorporate new infor ...

2024

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Rafael Botner Barmak, Robert Matthew Mills, Raphael Cherfan, Louis Arnaud Vahé Piotet

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where collaboration and division of labor enhance survival of the whole colony, and are thus considered “superorganisms”. Historically, studying behaviors involving ...

2024

A robotic honeycomb for interaction with a honeybee colony

Francesco Mondada, Rafael Botner Barmak, Robert Matthew Mills

Robotic technologies have shown the capability to interact with living organisms and even to form integrated mixed societies composed of living and artificial agents. Biocompatible robots, incorporating sensing and actuation capable of generating and respo ...

2023

The gram-negative sensing receptor PGRP-LC contributes to grooming induction in Drosophila

Bruno Lemaitre, Claudine Danielle Patricia Öngen

Behavioral resistance protects insects from microbial infection. However, signals inducing insect hygiene behavior are still relatively unexplored. Our previous study demonstrated that olfactory signals from microbes enhance insect hygiene behavior, and gu ...

Public Library of Science2017

Automated computer-based detection of encounter behaviours in groups of honeybees

Laurent Keller, Alessandro Crespi

Honeybees form societies in which thousands of members integrate their behaviours to act as a single functional unit. We have little knowledge on how the collaborative features are regulated by workers' activities because we lack methods that enable collec ...

Springer Nature2017

Oral transfer of chemical cues, growth proteins and hormones in social insects

Laurent Keller, Laure Menin, Daniel Ortiz Trujillo, Oksana Riba Grognuz

Social insects frequently engage in oral fluid exchange trophallaxis between adults, and between adults and larvae. Although trophallaxis is widely considered a food-sharing mechanism, we hypothesized that endogenous components of this fluid might underlie ...

Elife Sciences Publications Ltd2016

The Nimrod transmembrane receptor Eater is required for hemocyte attachment to the sessile compartment in Drosophila melanogaster

Bruno Lemaitre, Olivier Burri, Olivier Binggeli

Eater is an EGF-like repeat transmembrane receptor of the Nimrod family and is expressed in Drosophila hemocytes. Eater was initially identified for its role in phagocytosis of both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. We have deleted eater and show t ...

Company Of Biologists Ltd2015

Task-dependent influence of genetic architecture and mating frequency on division of labour in social insect societies

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller

Division of labour is one of the most prominent features of social insects. The efficient allocation of individuals to different tasks requires dynamic adjustment in response to environmental perturbations. Theoretical models suggest that the colony-level ...

Springer Verlag2010