Honeybee as an integrative study model: small and large-scale approaches to connect in-hive behavior with crop pollination.

FARINA WALTER M.

Guarujá

Conferencia; International Union for the Study of Social Insects (IUSSI 2018),; 2018

International Union for the Study of Social Insects

One-third of the global agricultural production comes from crops that require pollinators. The honeybee Apis mellifera is the most dominant pollinator in agricultural settings and its economic relevance has increased during the last decades due to the growth of the area used for pollinator-dependent crops. Despite the knowledge achieving from agronomical and veterinarian sciences to improve the relationship between honeybees and crops, the new reached insights coming from behavioral sciences, physiology and ecology of the honeybee have been little considered in order to attain more efficiency in terms of pollination success and crop yield. Nowadays it is clear that the sophisticated honeybee communication systems together with its cognitive and sensory abilities are nodal to understand not only how the information about resources is used during collective foraging, but also how fast and persistent the food-related information within the colony is. It was also possible to determine how the information managed within the hives affect and bias later behaviors, involving not only foraging age bees but also younger workers and even brood. Moreover, neurobiological approaches have been showed how plastic the nervous system is as a consequence of early experiences in the social context and their effects at a long-term scale. With all the evidence and points of view have been possible to perform an integrative and experimental approach that considers areas as diverse as chemical ecology, behavioral physiology, behavioral ecology, and agroecology, which have been studied in different commercial crops. Some results of this project will be shown in this presentation.