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First published online October 7, 2005
Journal of Experimental Biology 208, 3933-3943 (2005)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2005
doi: 10.1242/jeb.01792

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Effect of food quality, distance and height on thoracic temperature in the stingless bee Melipona panamica

James C. Nieh^* and Daniel Sánchez

Division of Biological Sciences, Section of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, University of California San Diego, MC#0116, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0116, USA

View larger version (67K): [in a new window]   Fig. 1. Typical thermograms of (A) foragers feeding at 2.5 mol l–1 sucrose solution on a feeder 20 m from the subject colony (thermal reflections off the glass are visible by the heads) and (B) of a forager returning from this feeder inside the nest (white arrowhead indicates the forager; three bees unloading their food are just barely visible to her left). In all cases, the thorax is the hottest region of each forager. The cursor mark shown in red is a reference point that corresponds to the laser target emitted during recording.

View larger version (39K): [in a new window]   Fig. 2. Longitudinal thermal profiles of foragers at the feeder and in the nest. Midline profiles for 20 different randomly chosen bees foraging at (A) 2.5 mol l–1 and (B) 1.0 mol l–1 sucrose solutions. Average thermal profiles are shown at right; broken lines indicate ± 1 S.D. Broken rectangles indicate thoracic regions. (C) Temperature distributions of different body parts for both sucrose concentrations inside the nest (open boxes) and at the feeder (filled boxes). Box plots show the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles of the distribution plotted. The feeder was placed 276 m south of the nest and 1 mabove the ground.

View larger version (27K): [in a new window]   Fig. 3. Effect of ambient air temperature Ta on forager thoracic temperature Tth inside the nest. Pooled data from all sucrose concentrations and distances. The regression line is shown as a broken line. The solid line shows how a one-to-one correspondence between Ta and Tth would appear.

View larger version (12K): [in a new window]   Fig. 4. Effect of sucrose solution concentration on forager thoracic temperatures Tth at a feeder located 20 m from nest. (A) The average increase in Tth over ambient air temperature Ta (Ta) with broken linear regression line; (B) the corresponding average Ta values. Values are means ± S.D. Sample size given in Table 1.

View larger version (16K): [in a new window]   Fig. 5. Effect of distance and sucrose concentration on forager thoracic temperatures in the nest. (A) The average increase in thoracic temperature over ambient air temperature at the nest (Tnest). Linear regression lines shown. (B) The corresponding average ambient air temperatures (Tnest) for each sucrose concentration are shown. Values are means ± S.D. Sample sizes given in Table 2. Asterisk indicates that symbols are displaced to either side of the 276 m coordinate to avoid obscuring values. Open symbols, 1.0 mol l–1 sucrose; closed symbols, 2.5 mol l–1 sucrose.