The Eusocial Organisms Of Honey Bees

Honey bees are eusocial insects belonging to the order Hymenoptera. There are several species of honey bees that include Apis mellifera (Western bee), Apis cerana, Apis dorsata (Indian bee) and Apis florea. Honey bees display a reproductive division of labour with a single queen, thousands of infertile female workers and male drones that arise due to parthenogenesis. This reproductive structure is complemented by a temporal division of labour: Honey bee workers first spend 3 weeks of their lives performing activities like change their tasks with age (age polyethism) and spend on average the first 3 weeks after emergence (eclosion) performing in-hive tasks before becoming foragers for the remainder of their lives (Charlotte E, 2012). The first 21 days of a worker bee before turning into a forager are spent by performing 16 tasks (Apis mellifera)

Different flowers open and close at different time periods during the day. This was observed by Carl von Linne who came up with the concept of the chronobiology in flowers that exhibited a strong circadian clock with respect to its flowering. Honey bees have the capacity to memorize the time when the flowers open and close to collect nectar when availability is at its peak in order to conserve energy. It is known that honey bees can be trained to visit a food site at a particular time and that they retain the memory of the time even in absence of the reward (Aschoff, 1986). The anticipatory behavior of honey bees was studied further and further experiments revealed that the circadian clock in honey bees was entrained by the feeding time (Aschoff, 1986). Molecular analysis of the clock focused on the clock genes and the peaks of the transcription to check the effects of circadian clock entrainment on the gene expression (Bloch,