Conveners
Social insects
- Mary Myerscough (University of Sydney)
All social insects live in elaborately organised societies. Their social structures enable them to continuously manage a large set of simultaneous tasks; from scouting and foraging to colony defence, nest building, thermoregulation, and brood care. To ensure colony survival and reproduction it is vital that the colony workforce is adequately allocated to these different tasks. Social insect...
In social insect colonies we often observe substantial levels of laziness, i.e., workers that do not engage or appear not to engage in any tasks. This is puzzling, because colonies with lazy individuals seem to be wasteful and may not be using their resources optimally. A common hypothesis is that lazy workers are a reserve workforce that can be quickly activated when rapid changes in the...
The intensification of farming indisputably changes the ecology of agricultural infectious diseases with modern management practice impacting both host density and between-host contacts. We typically assert that these changes result in higher disease burdens, but there is relatively little specific modelling testing this idea. For example, the industrialisation of apiculture has been suggested...
In recent years honey bee colonies have been experiencing increased loss of hives. One cause of hive loss is colony collapse disorder (CCD). Colony collapse disorder is characterised by a previously healthy hive having few or no adult bees but with food and brood still present. This occurs over several weeks. It is not known if there is an exact cause of CCD but rather it is thought to be the...
A conceptual model was constructed to define the network of potential routes of exposure of pollinators to pesticides in greater detail than has previously been done. This model provides a basis for biologically and ecologically realistic basis for mathematical estimation of exposure versus time both individually and at the colony level. It also shows the distinction between primary exposure...
