Mapping Sleeping Bees within Their Nest
Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Worker Honey Bee Sleep
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https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4100802/ <-- shared paper
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H/T Dimitrios A. Karras | Assoc. Professor at National & Kapodistrian University of Athens
“Bees are not only very important for all ecosystems... They are very cute too....
However, bee societies are very complex and different sleep patterns exist for the other kinds of bees in the hierarchy..
In general, bees actually sleep, and many species spend around 5-8 hours resting each day, usually at night when they’re not foraging.
Some solitary bees have been photographed sleeping inside flowers, where they cling onto the petals or stamens with their tiny legs and sometimes even their jaws.
One of the cutest parts is that tired bees can look almost like they’ve fallen asleep at work, curled up inside a flower with pollen still covering their bodies…”
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“Patterns of behavior within societies have long been visualized and interpreted using maps. Mapping the occurrence of sleep across individuals within a society could offer clues as to functional aspects of sleep. In spite of this, a detailed spatial analysis of sleep has never been conducted on an invertebrate society. [The authors] introduce the concept of mapping sleep across an insect society, and provide an empirical example, mapping sleep patterns within colonies of European honey bees (Apis mellifera L.). Honey bees face variables such as temperature and position of resources within their colony’s nest that may impact their sleep. [They] mapped sleep behavior and temperature of worker bees and produced maps of their nest’s comb contents as the colony grew and contents changed. By following marked bees, [they] discovered that individuals slept in many locations, but bees of different worker castes slept in different areas of the nest relative to position of the brood and surrounding temperature. Older worker bees generally slept outside cells, closer to the perimeter of the nest, in colder regions, and away from uncapped brood. Younger worker bees generally slept inside cells and closer to the center of the nest, and spent more time asleep than awake when surrounded by uncapped brood. The average surface temperature of sleeping foragers was lower than the surface temperature of their surroundings, offering a possible indicator of sleep for this caste. [They] propose mechanisms that could generate caste-dependent sleep patterns and discuss functional significance of these patterns…”
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“Maps help to integrate data in ways that clarify patterns or relationships in the lives of organisms. Mapping social phenomena can reveal the spread of disease, routes of migration, foraging paths, organization with respect to division of labour or brood sorting, spatial segregation of individuals within a colony, or spatial dynamics of competing colonies. Social insect colonies, and honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies in particular, lend themselves well to mapping of behavior. Honey bee activity has been visualized outside the nest with respect to flight paths, simulated flight paths relative to landmarks, and inside the nest for spatial organization of waggle dance information and patterns generated by removal rates of comb contents. [The researcher] Seeley created maps depicting twelve of the most commonly performed tasks within a nest of honey bees. Conspicuously absent, however, are maps depicting where bees reside when not performing tasks. Sleep is a behavior that has never been mapped extensively across an invertebrate society, in spite of its potential ecological and evolutionary significance. Studies mapping sleep of invertebrates are limited to measurements of individual inactivity, usually within highly artificial settings (e.g., fruit fly stasis within test tubes.) This is in contrast with the more extensive literature devoted to the study of vertebrate sleep sites, which has offered insight as to some functional implications of sleeping socially, especially with respect to vigilance and predator avoidance…”
#bee #insect #hive #sleeping #sleep #patterns #monitoring #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal #spatial #mapping #sleeppatterns #behaviour #society #community #honeybees #ecosystem #colony #infrared #remotesensing #temperature #instrumentation