Studies on Antennal Response of Giant Honeybees Towards Selected Plant Essential Oils

Syed Shoaib Qasim  lowast; Nagaraja Narayanappa

doi:10.53989/bu.ge.v13i1.19

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DOI: 10.53989/bu.ge.v13i1.19

Year: 2024, Volume: 13, Issue: 1, Pages: 30-33

Original Article

Studies on Antennal Response of Giant Honeybees Towards Selected Plant Essential Oils

Syed Shoaib Qasim^1∗, Nagaraja Narayanappa²

¹ Department of Zoology, Bangalore University, Jnana Bharathi, Bengaluru, India
² Malaviya Mission Teacher Training Centre, Bangalore University, Jnana Bharathi, Bengaluru, India

*Corresponding author email: [email protected]

Received Date:16 May 2024, Accepted Date:03 June 2024

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Essential oils of aromatic plants possess repellent properties against various insect species. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the response of honeybee, Apis dorsata towards 13 different plant essential oils through electroantennogram studies. Surprisingly, honeybees showed three (low, moderate, and high) levels of responses to essential oils based on the change in baseline voltage. The worker honeybees exhibit low antennal response towards patchouli (0.08±0.03mV) and eucalyptus (0.20±0.04mV) oils, moderate response to basil (0.39±0.08mV), Japanese mint (0.36±0.08 mV), ajwain (0.29±0.05 mV), star anise (0.26±0.05 mV) and sweet flag (0.23±0.05 mV) and high antennal response towards palmarosa (0.58±0.13mV), cinnamon (0.49±0.06 mV), peppermint (0.48±0.06mV), geranium (0.44±0.10mV), betal (0.44±0.08mV) and ginger oils (0.41±0.06mV). The findings of the study conclude that, these essential oils may be used to repel A. dorsata colonies from urban areas to safer forest patches to overcome the problem of human-wildlife conflict.

Keywords

Apis dorsata, electroantennogram, essential oils, repellents

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© 2024 Qasim & Narayanappa. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Published By Bangalore University, Bengaluru, Karnataka