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E-Mail IMAGE: A honey bee on a lavender plant, one of the species studied in the research view more Credit: Professor Francis Ratnieks, University of Sussex As abundant and widespread bees, it is common to see both bumble bees and honey bees foraging on the same flower species during the summer, whether in Britain or many other countries. Yet researchers at the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects (LASI) at the University of Sussex, show that these two different bees dominate on different flower species and have found out why. By studying 22 flower species in southern England and analysing the behaviour of more than 1000 bees, they found that energy efficiency is a key factor when it comes to mediating competition. ....
How animals transfer power from one leader to another: Brute force, inheritance and consensus elisfkc2 / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0 Bees, chimps, clownfish and hyenas all live in groups with a leader or dominant individual. So do many other animals. How does power shift from one animal to another? The transfer of power is sometimes not that simple. As the United States inaugurates a new president on Wednesday, here’s a look at the different ways the animal kingdom handles changes in leadership. Brute force For chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, a change in the alpha male can be a fairly brutal affair. ....
1 2Clinical Trials Unit, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland In 1954, Haldane and Spurway published a paper in which they discussed the information content of the honey bee waggle dance with regard to the ideas of Norbert Wiener, who had recently developed a formal theory of information. We return to this concept by reanalyzing the information content in both vector components (direction, distance) of the waggle dance using recent empirical data from a study that investigated the accuracy of the dance. Our results show that the direction component conveys 2.9 bits and the distance component 4.5 bits of information, which agrees to some extent with Haldane and Spurway s estimates that were based on data gathered by von Frisch. Of course, these are small amounts of information compared to what can be conveyed, given enough time, by human language, or compared to what is routinely transferred via the internet. Nevertheless, small amounts of information can be very valuable ....