Up Close and Personal with Killer Bees
Carolyn Gonzales
Communications Services
Oklahoma State University
(405) 744-6260
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This close-up photo of the head of an Africanized honeybee worker is one of many educational photos featured in a new book co-authored by OSU Psychology Professor Charles Abramson. |
Taking a close look at Africanized honeybees (so-called “killer
bees”) just got a lot easier, thanks to OSU Psychology Professor Charles
Abramson.
Abramson recently published a book titled, “A Scanning Electron Microscopy
Atlas of the Africanized ‘Killer’ Honey Bee ö A Selection of Photographs for
the General Public.” He co-authored the book with his colleague, Dr. Italo de Souza Aquino, who is a
researcher at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Brazil.
The book, printed in both English and Portuguese, is divided into an
introductory chapter and four chapters containing large, highly detailed
electron microscopy photos of various parts of a bee’s anatomy. The photos are
of workers, drones, queen Africanized bees and the
stinging apparatus of the worker bee.
The photos are arranged so that the first one in a series is an overview of a
particular structure and each following photo shows more detail of the various
components of the structure.
The introductory chapter describes the importance of the honeybee for studies
of learning and memory, provides a brief history of
the Africanized honey bee and describes some morphological and behavioral
differences and similarities among European and Africanized honeybees. The text
also summarizes the researchers’ experiments on learning in the Africanized
honeybee.
Abramson has worked with “killer” bees for a number of years, and he is an
expert on their behavior.
The photographed bees were captured by Abramson and his Brazilian colleagues in
Photos that would have the greatest interest to the general public, and at the
same time be useful to the scientific community, were selected for the book,
Abramson said.
He says the book can be a valuable resource for anyone interested in bees. He
thinks it will be particularly useful for instructors in colleges,
universities, and high school entomology, biology and zoology courses and for
those interested in electron microscopy.
In addition, he believes the book will be helpful for middle school teachers as
a companion to the classroom science area.
For information about this page, send e-mail to Carolyn Gonzales.
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