An overview of artificial nutrition in apiculture

Artificial nutrition in apiculture is a long-term subject of discussion and investigation. The maintenance and boosting of bee colonies in apiculture depends on synthetic food around the globe to overcome the suppressing factors, including dearth periods. The information on types of food components and their combinations used is haphazard and hardly helpful in determining the advancements in the artificial feeding of bees. This study aimed to extract the available information on artificial feeding on honeybees and arrange it most scientifically. The information in the form of research or review articles available on every platform, viz., soft portals, printed journals, books and scientific proceedings, were collected and analyzed to produce a comprehensive and informative review article on the artificial nutrients in apiculture. Compilation of the available information revealed that artificial feeding of bees depends on food components and their combinations. Based on this, it can be suggested that nectar and pollen are basic foods of honey bees, and based on this, the food components were further categorized as nectar supplements and pollen supplements. These supplements were fed to bees as natural nutrients and food components. The natural nutrients include proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, yeasts, antibiotics, amino acids, enzymes, antioxidants, etc. Meanwhile, under natural food components, cereal grains, pulses, beans, fruits, vegetables, medicinal plants, spices, condiments, and some non-traditional/ miscellaneous kinds of stuff have been included in the bee diets. On the other hand, many diet categories have been prepared using the abovementioned nutrients and food components in various forms and proportions. In general, the pollen and nectar, the main food of bees, have been supplemented under different diet combinations. These diet combinations used pollen and nectar substitutes or combined with other nutrition, drugs, antibiotics, etc. The present investigation provides an updated overview of the food categories and their combinations used in the artificial feeding of bees to date. These findings can help explore new food items and their effective diet combinations

A new species of Xiphogramma Nowicki (Hymenoptera: Chalcidoidea) from Saudi Arabia

Khan, Mohd Talib, Ahmad, Syed Kamran, Anis, Shoeba Binte, Dawah, Hassan Ali (2018): A new species of Xiphogramma Nowicki (Hymenoptera: Chalcidoidea) from Saudi Arabia. Zootaxa 4410 (2): 393-396, DOI: https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4410.2.1

Consumer-resource body-size relationships in natural food webs

It has been suggested that differences in body size between consumer and resource species may have important implications for interaction strengths, population dynamics, and eventually food web structure, function, and evolution. Still, the general distribution of consumer–resource body-size ratios in real ecosystems, and whether they vary systematically among habitats or broad taxonomic groups, is poorly understood. Using a unique global database on consumer and resource body sizes, we show that the mean body-size ratios of aquatic herbivorous and detritivorous consumers are several orders of magnitude larger than those of carnivorous predators. Carnivorous predator–prey body-size ratios vary across different habitats and predator and prey types (invertebrates, ectotherm, and endotherm vertebrates). Predator–prey body-size ratios are on average significantly higher (1) in freshwater habitats than in marine or terrestrial habitats, (2) for vertebrate than for invertebrate predators, and (3) for invertebrate than for ectotherm vertebrate prey. If recent studies that relate body-size ratios to interaction strengths are general, our results suggest that mean consumer–resource interaction strengths may vary systematically across different habitat categories and consumer types

Body sizes of consumers and their resources

Trophic information—who eats whom—and species' body sizes are two of the most basic descriptions necessary to understand community structure as well as ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Consumer–resource body size ratios between predators and their prey, and parasitoids and their hosts, have recently gained increasing attention due to their important implications for species' interaction strengths and dynamical population stability. This data set documents body sizes of consumers and their resources. We gathered body size data for the food webs of Skipwith Pond, a parasitoid community of grass-feeding chalcid wasps in British grasslands; the pelagic community of the Benguela system, a source web based on broom in the United Kingdom; Broadstone Stream, UK; the Grand Cariçaie marsh at Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland; Tuesday Lake, USA; alpine lakes in the Sierra Nevada of California; Mill Stream, UK; and the eastern Weddell Sea Shelf, Antarctica. Further consumer–resource body size data are included for planktonic predators, predatory nematodes, parasitoids, marine fish predators, freshwater invertebrates, Australian terrestrial consumers, and aphid parasitoids. Containing 16 807 records, this is the largest data set ever compiled for body sizes of consumers and their resources. In addition to body sizes, the data set includes information on consumer and resource taxonomy, the geographic location of the study, the habitat studied, the type of the feeding interaction (e.g., predacious, parasitic) and the metabolic categories of the species (e.g., invertebrate, ectotherm vertebrate). The present data set was gathered with the intent to stimulate research on effects of consumer–resource body size patterns on food-web structure, interaction-strength distributions, population dynamics, and community stability. The use of a common data set may facilitate cross-study comparisons and understanding of the relationships between different scientific approaches and models

Data Paper. Data Paper

<h2>File List</h2><blockquote> <p>Data file, original</p> <blockquote> <p>Data file is ASCII text, tab delimited. No compression schemes were used. Data set consists of 16,863 records, not including header row. </p> <p><a href="bodysizes.txt">bodysizes.txt</a></p> </blockquote> <p>Data file, revision 1</p> <blockquote> <p><a href="bodysizes_2008.txt">bodysizes_2008.txt</a></p> <p>Updated body size data for the food webs of Mill Stream and Skipwih Pond. Three additional predator–prey links were added to the Skipwith Pond data. All other food web data remain unchanged. The new database now contains 16,866 rows and the sum over the data in the column "Consumer/resource body mass ratio" now equals 2.47388 × 10²⁰. </p> </blockquote> </blockquote> <div> <hr> </div><h2>Description</h2><blockquote> <p>Trophic information – who eats whom – and species’ body sizes are two of the most basic descriptions necessary to understand community structure as well as ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Consumer-resource body size ratios between predators and their prey, and parasitoids and their hosts, have recently gained increasing attention due to their important implications for species’ interaction strengths and dynamical population stability. This data set documents body sizes of consumers and their resources. We gathered body size data for the food webs of Skipwith Pond, a parasitoid community of grass-feeding chalcid wasps in British grasslands; the pelagic community of the Benguela system, a source web based on broom in the United Kingdom; Broadstone Stream, UK; the Grand Cariçaie marsh at Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland; Tuesday Lake, USA; alpine lakes in the Sierra Nevada of California; Mill Stream, UK; and the eastern Weddell Sea Shelf, Antarctica. Further consumer–resource body size data are included for planktonic predators, predatory nematodes, parasitoids, marine fish predators, freshwater invertebrates, Australian terrestrial consumers, and aphid parasitoids. Containing 16,863 records, this is the largest data set ever compiled for body sizes of consumers and their resources. In addition to body sizes, the data set includes information on consumer and resource taxonomy, the geographic location of the study, the habitat studied, the type of the feeding interaction (e.g., predacious, parasitic) and the metabolic categories of the species (e.g., invertebrate, ectotherm vertebrate). The present data set was gathered with intent to stimulate research on effects of consumer–resource body size patterns on food-web structure, interaction-strength distributions, population dynamics, and community stability. The use of a common data set may facilitate cross-study comparisons and understanding of the relationships between different scientific approaches and models.</p> <p><i>Key words: allometry; body length; body mass; body size ratio; food webs; parasitoid–host; predation; predator–prey</i>.</p> </blockquote