Honey bee foragers form time memories that enable them to match their foraging activity to the time of day when a particular food source is most productive. Persistent foragers show food-anticipatory activity by making reconnaissance flights to the previously productive food source and may continue to inspect it for several days. In contrast, reticent foragers do not investigate the source but wait for confirmation from returning persistent foragers. To determine how persistent and reticent foragers might contribute to the colony's ability to rapidly reallocate foragers among sources, we trained foragers to collect sucrose from a feeder at a restricted time of day for several days and then observed their behavior for three consecutive days during which the feeder was empty. In two separate trials, video monitoring of the hive entrance during unrewarded test days in parallel with observing reconnaissance visits to the feeder revealed a high level of activity, in both persistent and reticent foragers, thought to be directed at other food sources. This 'extracurricular' activity showed a high degree of temporal overlap with reconnaissance visits to the feeder. In some cases, inspection flights to the unrewarded feeder were made within the same trip to an extracurricular source, indicating that honey bees have the ability to manage at least two different time memories despite coincidence with respect to time of day. The results have major implications for understanding flower fidelity throughout the day, flower constancy within individual foraging excursions, and the sophisticated cognitive management of spatiotemporal memories in honey bees.

Pollination syndromes refer to stereotyped floral characteristics (flower colour, shape, etc.) that are associated with a functional group of pollinators (bee, bird, etc.). The trumpet creeper Campsis radicans, endemic to the southeast and mid-west United States, has been assigned to the hummingbird-pollination syndrome, due mainly to its red, trumpet-shaped flowers. Previous studies demonstrated that the ruby-throated hummingbird Archilochus colubris is C. radicans' primary pollinator, but anecdotal data suggest various bee species may provide pollination service when hummingbirds are absent. This study characterised C. radicans nectar volume and concentration by time of day. Nectar volume was suitable for hummingbirds, but concentration was higher than typical hummingbird-pollinated plants (∼20% w/w); at ∼30% w/w, it approached the concentration expected in bee-pollinated plants (∼50% w/w). We also found substantial amounts of nectar at night. Two C. radicans populations received virtually no hummingbird visits, but the number of bees were markedly higher than in the populations previously described. Interestingly, there were no night-time visitors despite the large quantity of nocturnal nectar. Based on previously published pollen delivery per visit by various species, this study estimated that cumulative deposition by bees routinely reached pollen deposition thresholds for setting fruit in C. radicans. They are, unequivocally, the predominant pollinators in these populations, thus providing pollination service in the absence of hummingbirds. These results highlight C. radicans as a food source for native bees and add to the understanding of how floral phenotypes can facilitate pollination by disparate functional groups.

Honey bee (Apis mellifera) foragers can remember both the location and time of day food is collected and, even in the absence of a reward, reconnoiter the food source at the appropriate time on subsequent days. This spatiotemporal memory (time-memory) is linked to the circadian clock and enables foragers to synchronize their behavior with floral nectar secretion rhythms, thus eliminating the need to rediscover productive food sources each day. Here, we asked whether the establishment of one time-memory influences the formation of another time-memory at the same time of day. In other words, can two time-place memories with the same ‘time-stamp’ coexist? We simultaneously trained two groups of foragers from a single hive to two separate feeders at the same restricted time of day. After 5 days of training, one feeder was shut off. The second feeder continued being productive 4 more days. Our results showed that (1) foragers with high experience levels at the first source were significantly more likely than low-experience foragers to maintain fidelity to their original source and resist recruitment to the alternative source, (2) nearly one-third of foragers demonstrated multiple, overlapping time-memories by visiting both feeders at the correct time and (3) significantly more high-experience than low-experience foragers exhibited this multitasking behavior. The ability to maintain and act upon two different, yet contemporaneous, time-memories gives the forager bee a previously unknown level of versatility in attending to multiple food sources. These findings have major implications for understanding the formation and management of circadian spatiotemporal memories.

The mushroom bodies (MBs) are insect brain regions important for sensory integration, learning, and memory. In adult worker honey bees (Apis mellifera), the volume of neuropil associated with the MBs is larger in experienced foragers compared with hive bees and less experienced foragers. In addition, the characteristic synaptic structures of the calycal neuropils, the microglomeruli, are larger but present at lower density in 35-day-old foragers relative to 1-day-old workers. Age- and experience-based changes in plasticity of the MBs are assumed to support performance of challenging tasks, but the behavioral consequences of brain plasticity in insects are rarely examined. In this study, foragers were recruited from a field hive to a patch comprising two colors of otherwise identical artificial flowers. Flowers of one color contained a sucrose reward mimicking nectar; flowers of the second were empty. Task difficulty was adjusted by changing flower colors according to the principle of honey bee color vision space. Microglomerular volume and density in the lip (olfactory inputs) and collar (visual inputs) compartments of the MB calyces were analyzed using anti-synapsin I immunolabeling and laser scanning confocal microscopy. Foragers displayed significant variation in microglomerular volume and density, but no correlation was found between these synaptic attributes and foraging performance.

Smart devices (or things) in the realm of IoT (Internet of Things) talk to each other and transfer data over the Internet.IoT vendors provide APIs for their clients to send data to the gateways and application servers. However, there is a lack of guidelines on how a vendor would design its API and resource URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). A generic design solution –design patterns– would make the API design and development easier for the vendors. Design patterns are reusable solutions to recurring problems and provide improved reusability and understandability. Currently, there are no design patterns for URIs of IoT APIs that IoT vendors can use. In this paper, we analyzed more than 1,300 URIs from 13 IoT APIs including IBM Watson and Microsoft Azure, and proposed eight novel design patterns for URIs of IoT APIs. We analyzed one dataset divided into two subsets: (1) analysis set with 70% of all our URIs to define design patterns for URIs of IoT APIs and (2) validation set with the remaining 30% of the URIs to verify the prevalence of the defined design patterns. We could map 84% of our validation set to the defined design patterns, i.e., design patterns are prevalent in the IoT domain.

The utilization of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) has experiencedsignificant growth due to the increasing number of applications being devel-oped. APIs serve as a means to transfer data between different applications.While RESTful has been the standard API since its emergence around 2000,it is now being challenged by Facebook’s GraphQL, which was introducedin 2015. This study aims to fill a knowledge gap in the existing literatureon API performance evaluation by extending the focus beyond read opera-tions to include CREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE operations in both REST-ful APIs and GraphQL. Previous studies have predominantly examined theperformance of read operations, but there is a need to comprehensively un-derstand the behavior and effectiveness of additional CRUD operations. Toaddress this gap, we conducted a series of controlled experiments and anal-yses to evaluate the response time and RAM utilization of RESTful APIsand GraphQL when executing CREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE operations.We tested various scenarios and performance metrics to gain insights into thestrengths and weaknesses of each approach. Our findings indicate that con-trary to our initial beliefs, there are no significant differences between the twoAPI technologies in terms of CREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE operations.However, RESTful did slightly outperform GraphQL in the majority of tests.We also observed that GraphQL’s inherent batching functionality resulted infaster response times and lower RAM usage throughout the tests. On the otherhand, RESTful, despite its simpler queries, exhibited faster response times inGET operations, consistent with related work. Lastly, our findings suggestthat RESTful uses slightly less RAM compared to GraphQL in the context ofCREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE operations.

Little is known about the behavioral patterns of honey bee queens. To determine if mated honey bee queens possess diel rhythmicity in behavior, we observed them in glass-sided observation hives using three types of observation regimes: focal studies consisting of 2-hour and 24-hour continuous observations as well as scan-sampling of multiple queens. All behaviors (active: walking, inspecting, egg-laying, begging for food, feeding, and grooming self; inactive: standing) occurred at all times of day and night, but no queen showed consistent diel rhythmicity in any of the individual behaviors. There were no consistent diel differences in active versus inactive behaviors or the number of bees in the queen's retinue. This arrhythmicity was unchanged despite daily changes in both light and temperature levels. The arrhythmic behavior observed by most of the honey bee queens inside the colony appears to be similar to that exhibited by worker bees before they initiate foraging behavior.

Experiments were performed to investigate the influence of water availability on the diel patterns of nectar secretion (volume, concentration, sugar production) in male squash flowers as well as to discover what physical component of nectar honey bees use to trigger their time-memory. Squash plants were grown in the greenhouse and in the field under both constant and variable watering regimes. Throughout anthesis, nectar volume and sugar concentration were recorded. In the field, the temporal distribution of arrivals to squash was observed with and without blossoms present. In the greenhouse and in the field, squash flowers exhibit a consistent diel pattern of nectar secretion that does not significantly alter during drought conditions; flowers open just before sunrise (with low volume and sugar and high concentration) and close at midday (with high volume and sugar and low concentration). Honey bees preferentially arrived early in anthesis possibly cueing on either the sugar concentration or the first availability of nectar.

Experiments were performed to determine the influence of the honey bee time-memory on a forager bee's sensitivity to recruitment. Two groups of foragers from one colony were trained to separate food stations at the same restricted time of day for several consecutive days. Feeding then was canceled at one station but continued for four more days at the other. Bees with more days of training at a non-productive source were significantly less likely than foragers with less training to be recruited to an alternative food source presented at the same time of day. Furthermore, the ability of a forager to be recruited recovered after several days, but this recovery period was longer for bees with greater experience. These findings demonstrate a long-term influence of time-memory on subsequent foraging behavior, in contrast to currently accepted models for the allocation and re-allocation of honey bee foragers to food patches in the environment.

Examensarbetet föreslår en effektivare process för att analysera olika frågeställningar vid Skatteverkets utveckling av öppna API:er. Frågeställningarna är främst olika juridiska krav men också tekniska och säkerhetsmässiga. Skatteverkets har i dag ett antal e-tjänster med potential att utveckla till öppna API:er. Skatteverket är den svenska statliga myndighet som ansvarar för folkbokföring, beskattning, fastighetstaxering med mera vilket skulle vara ett steg framåt i den moderna e-förvaltningen. Rapporten tar också upp bakgrundsfakta om det juridiska, om öppna data samt olika sätt att använda och tillgängliggöra API:er för allmänheten och skillnaderna mellan öppna data och API:er. Vi har lagar och regeringsdirektiv som öppnar upp och uppmuntrar vidareutnyttjande och tillgång till data, men vi har också lagar som skapar begränsningar vilket gör analysen för att tillgängliggöra mer information väldigt viktig. Förutom vanliga lagar gäller också registerlagar som definierar mer precist hur Skatteverket får arbeta med registerlagsskyddad information. Skatteverkets nuvarande e-tjänster och API:er har analyserats med tanke på vidareutveckling samt undersökning av hur medarbetare på Skatteverket ser på framtida användning av dessa API:er samt nätverksekonomin. Som ett exempel kan det tänkas att man med hjälp av API:er via företags affärssystem enkelt kan göra en CSR-förfrågan varje månad för att då kunna justera skatteinbetalningar och minska riskerna att de anställda fått för mycket eller för lite skatt inbetalt till Skatteverket vilket kan leda till problem. Detta sparar också tid på företagens personalavdelningar. Ett flödesschema har konstruerats för att ge ett effektivt stöd i analysen, om det är lämpligt att en e-tjänst tillgängliggörs via API, samt utvecklingen av API-tjänsten. Den komplexa kravbilden gör att det är svårt att ge ett standardsvar för om det är lämpligt för att e-tjänster tillgängliggörs via API samt att det också är viktigt att ha säkerheten i åtanke. Det är också viktigt att vara införstådd med att teknik och juridik förändras över tid vilket medför att det behövs kontinuerliga analyser för att se att de uppfyller samtliga krav. / The thesis propose a more efficient process for analyzing different issues at the Swedish Tax Agency's development of open APIs. The issues are primarily different legal requirements but also technical and security aspects. The Swedish Tax Agency currently has a number of e-services with the potential to develop into open APIs. Skatteverket is the Swedish government agency responsible for public records, taxation, property valuation, and this would be a step forward in modern e-government. The report also addresses background facts about the legal, open data, and different ways of using and making available public APIs and the differences between open data and APIs. We have laws and government directives that open up and encourage reuse and access to data, but we also have laws that create limitations, making the analysis to make more information available very important. In addition to ordinary laws, register laws also define more precisely how the Tax Agency is allowed to work with data protection. The Tax Agency's current e-services and APIs are analyzed in terms of further development and examination of how employees at the Swedish Tax Agency look at the future use of these APIs as well as the network economy. As an example, it can be assumed that with the help of APIs through corporate business systems could easily do a monthly CSR-request to be able to adjust tax payments and reduce the risks that employees have received too much or too little tax paid to the Tax Agency which can lead to problems. This also saves a lot of manual work for the human resources department of corporations. The report presents a flow chart that can be used as support to determine whether it is appropriate for an e-service to be made available through an API, and the development of the API-service. The complex requirements makes it difficult to provide a standard response if it is appropriate for e-services to be made available through APIs and that it is also important to keep the security in mind. It is also important to be aware that technology and laws change over time which means that a continuous analysis is required to ensure that they meet all requirements.