Data from: Long-lived winter honey bees show unexpectedly high levels of flight activity compared to short-lived summer bees

This dataset results from the automated RFID monitoring of honey bees marked throughout the year, from 2021-05-21, to 2022-04-27. In total, the number of flights, total flight duration, and lifespan of 523 honey bees that emerged during the year, including short-lived bees of spring, summer and autumn and long-lived winter bees. The flight activity performance of short-lived bees decreased progressively from spring to autumn for both the number of flights and the total flight duration. Furthermore, only a fraction of the bees emerging before winter are long-lived winter bees, with a lifespan of 143.5 ± 23.5 days (mean ± SD). With an average of 37.5± 44.2 flights and 12.7 ± 15.5 hours of flight, long-lived winter bees were substantially more active than short-lived bees of summer and autumn, but performed similar activity than short-lived bees of spring. In addition, a small proportion of long-lived winter bees participate in the vast majority of the flight activity of the colony. These results suggest that the extended lifespan of long-lived winter bees does not affect their flight activity performance, probably supported by their physiological qualities.
The data are related to the scientific paper "Minaud, E., et al. (Accepted) Long-lived winter honey bees show unexpectedly high levels of flight activity compared to short-lived summer bees. Apidologie".
Data are available as a csv file titled "2024.11.07_Minaud_et_al_data_RFID.csv".
# METADATA
#'data.frame': 523 obs. of 10 variables:
# $ UID : Factor variable ; a unique identity of each bee monitored
# $ colony: Factor variable ; three factors are available, representing the bee colony, with “RE” for the colony in summer and “RH1” & “RH2” for the two colonies in winter.
# $ cohort: Factor variable ; 5 factors are available, “CE1”, “CE2”, “CE3”, “CE4” and “CE5” for the five cohorts in summer, and “CH” for the cohort of winter.
# $ date_intro: Date variable ; 5 dates are available corresponding to the introduction date of each cohort.
# $ date_dead: Date variable ; representing estimated date of death of the bee monitored.
# $ LSP: Numeric variable ; representing the lifespan (in days) of the monitored bee.
# $ long_profile: Factor variable ; two factors are available representing the longevity profile of the monitored bee, with “Short-lived” and “Long-lived”.
# $ flightspan.nb: Numeric variable ; representing the number of flight of the monitored bee.
# $ flightspan.dur: Numeric variable ; representing the total flight duration (in minutes) of the monitored bee.
# $ act_period: Factor variable ; 4 factors are available, representing the flight activity period of each bee monitored, with “N” no flight activity, “B” flight activity only before winter (before the 2022-01-05), “A” flight activity only after winter (after the 2022-01-05), and “B&A” flight activity before and after winter.