ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the dynamics of the defensive response, which includes guarding, attack, and pursuit, each of which is often mediated by alarm pheromones. Defensive behavior, and associated stinging incidents, are the most attention getting aspect of Africanized bee behavior. Quantitative studies of defensive responses have shown that Africanized bees have greatly enhanced responses to movement, vibration, and to alarm pheromone, as compared to North American stocks. Bees fostered from highly defensive colonies into low defense colonies are more likely to guard than bees from low defense colonies fostered into high defense colonies. The correlation of different components of the defensive response could be used to support the hypothesis that there is an underlying unified variable that determines the defensiveness of a colony. Most assays of colony defensiveness use probability of flight or probability of stinging a target as measures of "aggressiveness".
