Dear colleagues,

A honeybee colony is a well-organized unit of social life that is composed of highly interacting groups of single organisms with different duties, age-dependent behavioral routines, and experience. Honeybees are the most important pollinators of fruit-bearing flowers, and share similar ecological niches with many other pollinators. The health of a honeybee colony can reflect the conditions of a whole ecosystem. The performance of the colony is reflected in its growth, brood production, homeostasis of physical and chemical parameters, and the social signals that bees exchange during their sophisticated body movements such as the waggle dance. Dance activities tightly mirror foraging activities across an area of some 5 km radius around a hive. Since a dance codes the outbound component of the flight to the pollinated flowers or other food sources, available information potentially allows the spatial tracking of pollination activities.

The health of honeybee colonies, and thus their pollination efficiency, depends on multiple components, including season, environmental conditions, bee-keeping activities, infections by parasites (viruses, bacteria, fungi, mites), and exposure to insecticides. The latter is particularly relevant in modern agricultures, since many insecticides act directly on the nervous system of honeybees and have been found to compromise not only foraging activity and navigation, but also social communication. Other insect pollinators (butterflies, beetles, flies, solitary bee) are also affected by environmental hazards and insecticides, and thus monitoring their effects on the performance of honeybee colonies provides information beyond honeybee pollination activities.

The recording of physical and biological parameters, both inside and outside of the colony, opens up opportunities to uncover links between biological phenomena of the colony (e.g., brood cycles, preparation for swarming, health conditions) and physical parameters of the environment. These signals will allow the quantification of normal and detrimental conditions of the whole colony. Multiple devices have been constructed in recent years to collect information about the biology of honeybee colonies. It will be highly informative to compare these devices and improve on their diagnostic value for environmental monitoring.

Prof. Dr. Randolf Menzel
Guest Editor

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• Signals from the bee hive
• Bees as environmental scouts
• Recording of social signals
• Environmental hazards
• Pollination activity
• Effects of insecticides
• The hive as a hub of environmental conditions
• Social life under stress
• Machine learning approaches for the identification of social signals
• Health conditions of bee colonies and the environment