grooming behaviour - hygenic behaviour

[josethayil]

hi everyone,
i was just going through all the different hygenic behaviours expressed by bees and i see there is not much importance gven to the grooming behavoiur of bees.............i personally think this is one of the most important factors for a hygenic hive because it stops most of the diseases and pests like varroa from entering the hive and passing from one hive to another.

most of the bees which are resistant to varroa shows a high level of grooming behavoir(egyptian bees, Monticola bees). Why is this trait of bees not given a high importance while selection for hygenic behaviour? if the bees can stop varroa from entering into the hive and spreading through grooming behavoiur, shouldnt it be a trait to be selected for by the queen breeders and other research institutions?

i would like to know what you all think about it.........so please post your thoughts............

[tecumseh]

josethayil writes:
Why is this trait of bees not given a high importance while selection for hygenic behaviour?

tecumseh:
likely due to the fact that varroa was not as large a problem as afb when the term hygenic behavior was coined. thus hygenic behavoir now doesn't suggest grooming but the ability to first determine that something is wrong with the brood and then the removal of this brood. the name now suggest specific test(s) not even closely associated with grooming.

a couple of toss ya' back questions... 1) what would be a definitive test for grooming and 2)how certain can anyone be that what the bees are actually doing is grooming (ie and not some other function that simply looks like grooming to us primates)?

[adamf]

In the 90's I did an unpublished experiment looking at chewed/damaged varroa
per hive per week on sticky board fall. I did not find any significant
differences in our population, and drew the conclusion that all honey bees
perform some Varroa mite grooming.

Now, it would be interesting to test this now and compare non-survivor bees to
survivor/feral bees and see if there were higher levels of chewed/groomed
mites in the survivor bees.

Adam Finkelstein
www.vpqueenbees.com

[josethayil]

there are records of how to observe grooming in bees, in the egyptian and monticola bees we can actually see most of the bees being checked before they enter the hive by the nurse bees which are at the hive entrance. when you pull a frame of bees which shows a high level of grooming behaviour, you can actually see that taking place(bees grooming them selves and grooming each other). There are some other claims also like a hive showing grooming behaviour has bees which have shiny body due to the grooming. I am not sure about this claim.

Apis cerana is also another bees which shows very good grooming behaviour. it is visible to see that the bees of some colonies groom better that the bees of some other colonies.

The chewed mites from a hive is due to the grooming behaviour. so it will be good to select bees which show great grooming behavoiur to add into the already existing hygenic and mite resistant(vsh) lines to make them better bees.

[tecumseh]

adamf writes:
In the 90's I did an unpublished experiment looking at chewed/damaged varroa
per hive per week on sticky board fall. I did not find any significant
differences in our population, and drew the conclusion that all honey bees
perform some Varroa mite grooming.

tecumseh ask:
could you describe the kind of bees (race) that you tested?

josethayil writes:
There are some other claims also like a hive showing grooming behaviour has bees which have shiny body due to the grooming. I am not sure about this claim.

tecusmeh:
robbing bees and guard bees checking bees at the front door during periods of robbing might also fit this description????

[naturebee]

adamf writes:..there are records of how to observe grooming in bees, in the egyptian and monticola bees we can actually see most of the bees being checked before they enter the hive by the nurse bees which are at the hive entrance.

I’ve made recordings of what appears to me as grooming behavior at the entrance, I'm still open-minded if it is or is not grooming, kinda leaning toward grooming. But, most experts that have viewed it, stated it seemed more like inspection behavior. But if it were inspection behavior, I have yet to hear a good explanation for why a bee being inspected and assumed to be a foreign bee would lift a Tergite to expose its vital parts to a guard bee that might be intending to do it harm. The bee appears to be lifting the Tergite to allow the bee to inspect there in a place where mites are known to hide.
http://www.sharkle.com/member/FeralHoneybeeProject

Best Wishes
Joe

[josethayil]

checking for robbing bees are different from grooming at the hive entrance. grooming at the hive entrance by nurse bees and guard bees is by actually helping the other bees to groom their body parts like behind the wings and all by(which they cannot groom themselves) grooming it for them. but checking for robbing bees are just meerely checking if they have the same smell and are they of the same hive. these are two totally different things.

the bees in a hive which shows grooming behavoiur are more shiny because while grooming they actually loose a bit of their body hair and it helps to keep them clean.

[tecumseh]

josethayil writes:
these are two totally different things.

tecumseh:
I am not trying to create some argumenent here josethayil and to be perfectly honest at one time in my life I would not have disagreed with you one bit. After being married to a (wild thing) behaviorist (a person that makes her living watching wild things very closely) for a long time... how I look at these things is now a bit different. Not that I consider myself real rigid or formal in these regards but quite evidently the hazarda here are to 1) put a human spin on something that is not done by humans and 2) describe some action that looks one way to you as a human but is not that way for the species being watch. My contribution here is just a warning and I would guess the real place for someone to begin is some fairly formalized breakdown to determine exactly what is and what is not grooming behavior.

I think your larger thesis... ie some connection between grooming behavior and tolerance of varroa is not that exotic or far fetched. It is fairly well established that there are genetic linkage to some behavior (so some behaviorial traits can be selected for) and I would suspect hive demographics would also play a significant role in the display of many bee behavioral traits.

[Michael Palmer]

I didn't have time this morning to read through all the papers, but...

Google Greg Hunt from Purdue. He and his tech Crispin Givin are working on the grooming behaviour.

[adamf]

could you describe the kind of bees (race) that you tested?

The study was done in 1996.The bees in the study were commercial Italians from Georgia, USA and some local bees selected from a Buckfast/Florida mutt line from
the same time-period.

The hypothesis was that the local line would groom more than the commercial line.
If I have time this season, I'm going to try run the experimant again.

Adam Finkelstein
www.vpqueenbees.com

[josethayil]

This was copied fro the net which is about the grooming behavoiur

Two behaviours of honey bees, hygienic and grooming, are mechanisms of defence against brood diseases and parasitic mites, including Varroa destructor. Apis mellifera colonies remove the worker brood infested with V. destructor mites from the nest (hygienic behaviour) and groom the mites off other adult bees (grooming behaviour). In this study, the hygienic and grooming behaviours of Syenichko-Peshterski honey bee ecotype were analysed in 440 honey bee colonies from 11 localities in the region of Syenichko-Peshterski plateau, Podpeshterje, Golija Mt. and Rogozna Mt. At each locality, 40 honey bee colonies were investigated: 10 potent colonies with one-year-old queen, 10 potent colonies with two-year-old queen, 10 medium potent and 10 weak honey bee colonies. Hygienic behaviour was expressed in a range of 95.12 to 99.50% in potent honey bee colonies with one-year-old and two-year-old queens. Highly significant (p<0.01) differences were observed among the analysed honey bee colonies at the investigated region, in favour of the potent honey bee colonies, compared to the medium potent and weak colonies. Moreover, highly significant (p<0.01) differences were observed between potent colonies with one-year-old queens and colonies with two-year-old queens, in favour of the colonies with one-year-old queens. In general, investigated colonies belonged to the category of the so called hygienic colonies, as the efficiency of elimination of damaged pupae amounted to 91.50%. Grooming behaviour of Syenichko-Peshterski honey bee ecotype potentially existed, but its significance could not be discussed as, on the whole, investigated colonies showed a potential of 34.04%. The results pointed to an indisputable relationship between analysed behaviours and the strength of honey bee colonies. Hygienic behaviour was more expressed in potent colonies (from 95.12% to 99.50%) regardless of queen age. Grooming behaviour was expressed only in potent honey bee colonies with one-year-old queen at all 11 localities, where the number of damaged mites ranged from 36.05% to 39.61%. The damaged mites were separated into 6 categories. The most frequent category was damaged legs (53.38% in potent colonies with one-year-old queens and 52.02% in potent colonies with two-year-old queens). The potent honey bee colonies from the investigated region, especially with one-year-old queen, could be used for highly selected breed improvement and queen rearing.

[naturebee]

josethayil ,
Does your grooming look like this?
http://www.sharkle.com/member/FeralHoneybeeProject

Hope the link works, if not, I'll be back to try and fix it.

Joe

[josethayil]

no. grooming does not look like that

[tony350i]

no. grooming does not look like that


what does it look like,

i will have to take the camera down to my bees and see it they do it.

Regards Tony

[josethayil]

grooming in different bees are in different ways. in the above video link it loooks more like the bees are checking the one bee(maybe its from another hive).

Usual grooming in front of the hive is pretty much like one or two bees cleaning another bee and the the bee which is getting the grooming done cooperates well by lifting its wings and all. it is common to watch bees grooming themselves also in front of the hive. some strains of apis mellifera show grooming of higher degree than other strains. for example grooming is high in apis mellifera monticola, apis mellifera lamarkii(egyptian bees) and apis mellifera scutellata(low land african bees). but in the european strains of apis mellifera it is not very common but it is not absent. some ecotypes of the european strains of apis mellifera shows a good degree of grooming.

another type of honey bee which shows high degree of grooming is the apis cerana bees(asian honey bees)

[tecumseh]

snip...
Syenichko-Peshterski honey bee ecotype

tecumseh:
boy that went right ovr my head... could some one eleaborate?

thank ya' adamf for the additonal information on your little study. did the studies results suggest that either line was more likely to autogroom than the other? interesting that you decided to look for evidence associated with auto grooming rather than any display of auto grooming itself.

so it appear josethayil that hygenic behavior relates only to brood hygene while auto grooming is a behavior of audults (workers I presume)???? just trying to get my dictionary correct here.

auto grooming seems to be a subject on which you are familar.... so I do hope you might be able to bring us up a notch on this subject matter. I have wanted to casually watch for auto grooming behavior myself... but as I previously suggested I would first really want to know what I was seeing was actually behavior related to X rather than just random behavior (ie noise).

[naturebee]

no. grooming does not look like that

Are you sure?
I have spent a great deal of time observing this allogrooming behavior in a population of feral honeybees, and have witnessed a mite being dislodged in the process. In one video, is a bee lifting Tergite to invite grooming there. I doubt that any foreign bee would lift its shell to expose vital parts. Another video shows bees grooming under the wing of a bee. I have also observed bees exiting the hive being groomed, so this suggests house bees are being groomed and not inspection of foreign bees as you claim is occuring. I have contacted several experts in the USA about this behavior, and not one of them categorically ruled out allogrooming as you do, so I doubt you have the credentials to make any such mater of fact ruling.

Best Wishes
Joe
Feralbeeproject.com

[josethayil]

sorry mate if i was wrong aboutthat video. As i am not an expert in this matter i wont comment on those videos. i was not trying to put you off or anything. my bad.

[adamf]

thank ya' adamf for the additonal information on your little study. did the studies results suggest that either line was more likely to autogroom than the other? interesting that you decided to look for evidence associated with auto grooming rather than any display of auto grooming itself.


In pilot studies and through field observations, there was indication of grooming behavior, actually more allo-grooming then auto-grooming. (Auto=self, allo=other).
I've seen more allo-grooming in the field than auto-grooming associated with Varroa. I would not assume that crushed or damaged mites are from auto-grooming. They could be a result of either type.

I didn't look into the work Mike Palmer referenced in a previous post on grooming behavior, but a quick google search produced the following:
http://www.dzoo.uevora.pt/index.php/dzoo/investigacao/artigos/grooming_behaviour_towards_varroa_jacobsoni_in_fou r_strains_of_apis_mellifera

António Murilhas did not find evidence to support grooming behavior had potential
as a native Varroa defense in the population. This is exactly what I found.
One could certainly select/breed for this defensive behavior (allo, auto, or both) if they aren't already.

Adam Finkelstein
www.vpqueenbees.com

[tecumseh]

adamf writes:
António Murilhas did not find evidence to support grooming behavior had potential
as a native Varroa defense in the population. This is exactly what I found.
One could certainly select/breed for this defensive behavior (allo, auto, or both) if they aren't already.

tecumseh:
I'm confused a bit here. So there was no evidence was allo/auto grooming was successful, or effective, or was displayed at a significant enough level???? If the behavior was not displayed (anywhere close to a significant level) how could it be selected for?

[justgojumpit]

Just a thought... since it was noticed that stronger hives do more grooming behavior, did anyone give thought to the fact that grooming behavior may be somehow related to the strength of the hive, and not necessarily to the genetics of the bees?

justgojumpit

[adamf]

Selection can be made at many levels. If there is evidence that there are damaged mites, the beekeeper can positivley assume that some bees are damaging them. Wether they are damaged by allo-grooming behavior or auto-grooming behvior is moot. They are being damaged. To select for bees that defensivley groom, one would breed from the colonies that showed more damaged mites, for several generations and then compare the result with a control from the general population.

The research I did and the cited research indicates that the potential is there.

Natural selection could favor Honey Bees that perform auto/allo-grooming over the long haul. The population would then exhibit more grooming behavior. Like Apis cerana.

Adam Finkelstein
www.vpqueenbees.com

[adamf]

Just a thought... since it was noticed that stronger hives do more grooming behavior, did anyone give thought to the fact that grooming behavior may be somehow related to the strength of the hive, and not necessarily to the genetics of the bees? justgojumpit

Sure--some hives will have the propensity with strength to groom more than others. Those would be the ones one would want to select from in a breeding program.

Adam Finkelstein
www.vpqueenbees.com

[justgojumpit]

My point is that the strength of the hive may not be an effect of the grooming, but rather the grooming may be an effect of the strength of the hive. before anyone goes through all of the effort to select for bees that show increased grooming behavior, perhaps we should pay some attention to see if a strong hive that exhibits good grooming behavior continues to do so when the hive is weakened in some way.

justgojumpit

[Michael Bush]

>since it was noticed that stronger hives do more grooming behavior, did anyone give thought to the fact that grooming behavior may be somehow related to the strength of the hive, and not necessarily to the genetics of the bees?

My guess is that it's both. But this is why research on bees is difficult. How do you pin down which and how much was the cause?

[tecumseh]

justgojumpit writes:
Just a thought... since it was noticed that stronger hives do more grooming behavior

tecumseh:
well I would suspect two possibilities...
a) a demographic threshold effect... aligned with age related task.

b) higher drone number which likely translates to higher varroa numbers and therefore more varroa and more grooming.

so is it my understanding AdamF from your prior test that some hives do and some hives do not auto and allo groom? some do one, some do the other and some both?

[adamf]

so is it my understanding AdamF from your prior test
that some hives do and some hives do not auto and allo groom? some do one,
some do the other and some both?

I've seen bee hives perform both behaviors. I've also seen bee hives
perform one or the other behavior. The chances that Apis mellifera
spp. allo and auto groom in populations is great--this is positively
adaptive behavior and would be selected for over time: colonies that
performed one, the other or both are more likely to be successful then
colonies that perform neither.

Enter in Varroa destructor. Rapidly the selection pressure changes
as colonies that perform allo and auto grooming as well as colonies that do
not both die out with Varroa. However, a few make it! They have something or a
combination of somethings that keep the colony successful despite Varroa
and Varroa associated problems (virus etc). What is making these survivor
colonies successful? Maybe grooming? Maybe VSH? Maybe worker development time.
Maybe other behaviors? Maybe different combinations of these traits in different populations?

Determining what is actually keeping these colonies surviving is extremely
difficult. Yet, one can pick these colonies and make more of them to form
an updated population. Genetic combinations expressing phenotypic traits
that keep these colonies alive are replicated with these new selections.

Honey Bees have grooming behavior (allo and auto) in their behavioral
repertoire. As the population becomes tuned to being more tolerant to Varroa,
these behaviors might become more important since the colonies exhibiting
them more might also be the ones surviving. But maybe not. Time will tell.

Adam Finkelstein
www.vpqueenbees.com

[josethayil]

grooming maynot be the only way to get rid of varroa and other diseases, so if we can bring the hygenic behaviour, VSH traits, and grooming together into one set of bees by selective breeding and cross breeding we will have a better bee which is resistant not just to varroa but also to other diseases like the foulbroods etc. Then from those bees we will be able to select for honey production and all.