Matching Items (3)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Mathematics
- Resource Type: Text
Description
Honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies have experienced substantial losses due to colony collapse disorder (CCD) since the first officially reported cases in 2006. Many factors have been implicated in CCD, including pests, pathogens, malnutrition, and pesticide use, but no correlation has been found between a single factor and the occurrence of CCD. Fungicides have received less research attention compared to insecticides, despite the fact that fungicide application coincides with bloom and the presence of bees. Pristine fungicide is widely used in agriculture and is commonly found as a residue in hives. Several studies have concluded that Pristine can be used without harming bees, but reports of brood loss following Pristine application continue to surface across the country. The primary objectives of this study were to determine whether Pristine causes an aversive gustatory response in bees and whether consumption of an acute dose affects responsiveness to sucrose. An awareness of how foragers interact with contaminated food is useful to understand the likelihood that Pristine is ingested and how that may affect bees' ability to evaluate floral resources. Our results indicated that Pristine has no significant effect on gustatory response or sucrose responsiveness. There was no significant difference between bee responses to Pristine contaminated sucrose and sucrose alone, and no significant effect of Pristine on sucrose responsiveness. These results indicate that honey bees do not have a gustatory aversion to Pristine. A lack of aversion means that honey bees will continue collecting contaminated resources and dispersing them throughout the colony where it can affect brood and clean food stores.
ContributorsMcHugh, Cora Elizabeth (Co-author) / Jernigan, Christopher (Co-author, Committee member) / Burden, Christina (Co-author) / DeGrandi-Hoffman, Gloria (Co-author) / Smith, Brian (Thesis director) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Analytic research on basketball games is growing quickly, specifically in the National Basketball Association. This paper explored the development of this analytic research and discovered that there has been a focus on individual player metrics and a dearth of quantitative team characterizations and evaluations. Consequently, this paper continued the exploratory research of Fewell and Armbruster's "Basketball teams as strategic networks" (2012), which modeled basketball teams as networks and used metrics to characterize team strategy in the NBA's 2010 playoffs. Individual players and outcomes were nodes and passes and actions were the links. This paper used data that was recorded from playoff games of the two 2012 NBA finalists: the Miami Heat and the Oklahoma City Thunder. The same metrics that Fewell and Armbruster used were explained, then calculated using this data. The offensive networks of these two teams during the playoffs were analyzed and interpreted by using other data and qualitative characterization of the teams' strategies; the paper found that the calculated metrics largely matched with our qualitative characterizations of the teams. The validity of the metrics in this paper and Fewell and Armbruster's paper was then discussed, and modeling basketball teams as multiple-order Markov chains rather than as networks was explored.
ContributorsMohanraj, Hariharan (Co-author) / Choi, David (Co-author) / Armbruster, Dieter (Thesis director) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Brooks, Daniel (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
Division of Labor among social insects is frequently discussed in regards to the colony's worker population. However, before a colony achieves a worker population, a queen is required to perform all of the tasks necessary for her survival: foraging, building the colony, and brood care. A simple ODE model was developed through the use of a framework of replicator equations in dynamical environments to investigate how queen ants perform and distribute all of the tasks necessary for her and her colony's survival by incorporating individual internal thresholds and environmental stimulus. Modi�cations to the internal threshold, risk of performing the task, and the rate of increase of the environmental stimulus were also explored. Because of the simplicity of the model, it could also be used to measure the task performance of larger populations of social insects. However, the model has only been applied to the data collected from Pogonomyrmex barbatus single queen ants.
ContributorsKincade, Katherine Margaret (Author) / Kang, Yun (Thesis director) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Lanchier, Nicolas (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12