Research on honey bees traditionally focuses on studies on the central European Apis mellifera populations: Apis mellifera carnica and ligustica. Colonies of these populations have been exported all over the world. So nowadays if people talk about the decline of honey bees worldwide, they mainly talk about the problems of these human kept European honey bee populations.

Most researchers and most of the public miss, that there are about ten different species of honey bees in Asia, and five of them native to India. We do not know much about their biology and their impact on pollination and human food security. Most of these honey bee species are wild and there is no experience in studying their biology. In the last years my lab started to study some of the behaviors and social organization of Asian honey bee species. In my talk I will zoom in on some of our experiments, findings and future directions.

Pollination, division of labor, behavioral maturation, olfactory receptor genes, pheromone communication, dance communication