The Spirit of the Hive

by Robert E. Page Jr.

Overview

How can 40,000 bees working in the dark, by instinct alone, construct a honey comb? Synthesizing decades of experiments, The Spirit of the Hive presents the genetic and physiological mechanisms underlying the division of labor in honey bee colonies and explains how it is an inevitable product of group living, evolving over millions of years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674075566
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	06/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	6 MB

Table of Contents

Contents Foreword by Bert Hölldobler Preface 1. Darwin’s Dilemma and the Spirit of the Hive 1.1 Natural History of the Honey Bee 1.2 Summary Comments 2.1 Stimulus-Response Basis of Behavior 2.2 Th e Logic of Division of Labor 2.3 Case Studies 2.4 Adaptive Fine Tuning of Division of Labor 2.5 From Stone Soup to Mulligan Stew 2.6 Summary Comments 3. Individual Variation in Behavior 3.1 Genetic Variation and Behavior 3.2 Polyandry in the Honey Bee 3.3 Genetic Recombination in Honey Bees 3.5 Genetic Variation for Worker Behavior 3.6 Behavioral Plasticity and Constraints 3.7 Genetic and Behavioral Dominance 3.8 Behavioral Plasticity and Colony Resilience 3.9 Laying-Worker Behavior 3.10 Summary Comments 4.1 Why Do Queens Mate with So Many Males? 4.2 Sex Determination and Polyandry 4.3 Pathogens and Parasites 4.4 Genotypic Diversity and Division of Labor 4.5 A Pluralistic View of the Evolution of Polyandry 5.1 Levels of Biological Organization 5.2 Selective Breeding for Pollen Hoarding 5.3 Individual Behavior 5.4 Sensory-Response Systems 5.5 Associative Learning 5.6 Nonassociative Learning 5.8 Neurobiochemistry 5.9 Anatomy of Worker Ovaries and Vitellogenin 5.11 Phenotypic Architecture of Africanized Honey Bees 5.12 A Pollen-Hoarding Syndrome 6.1 Background 6.2 Mapping Pollen Hoarding 6.3 Verifi cation of Quantitative Trait Loci 6.4 Identification of Pln3 6.5 Pln4 and Mapping the Interactionsof Pollen-Hoarding QTLs 6.6 Mapping the Ovary and Juvenile Hormone Regulation by Vitellogenin 6.7 Candidate QTLs 6.8 Caveat 7.1 Background 7.2 The Double-Repressor Model 7.3 The Reproductive-Ground-Plan Hypothesis and Early Experiments 7.4 How Vitellogen in Affects Onset of Foraging and Foraging Behavior 7.5 Evidence for the Reproductive-Ground-Plan Hypothesis 7.6 Difficulties with the Vitellogen in Foraging Model 7.7 Summary Comments 8. Developmental Regulation of Reproduction 8.1 Queen and Worker Phenotypes 8.2 Nurses and Larvae Share Developmental Programs 8.3 Developmental Signatures of Colony-Leve lArtificial Selection 8.4 Summary Comments 9.1 Loading Algorithms 9.2 Heritability of the Pollen-Hoarding Syndrome 9.3 Social Regulation of Pollen Hoarding 10. A Crowd of Bees Acknowledgments Index