Honey bees communicate to nestmates locations of resources, including food, water, tree resin and nest sites, by making waggle dances. Dances are composed of repeated waggle runs, which encode the distance and direction vector from the hive or swarm to the resource. Distance is encoded in the duration of the waggle run, and direction is encoded in the angle of the dancer's body relative to vertical. Glass-walled observation hives enable researchers to observe or video, and decode waggle runs. However, variation in these signals makes it impossible to determine exact locations advertised. We present a Bayesian duration to distance calibration curve using Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations that allows us to quantify how accurately distance to a food resource can be predicted from waggle run durations within a single dance. An angular calibration shows that angular precision does not change over distance, resulting in spatial scatter proportional to distance. We demonstrate how to combine distance and direction to produce a spatial probability distribution of the resource location advertised by the dance. Finally, we show how to map honey bee foraging and discuss how our approach can be integrated with Geographic Information Systems to better understand honey bee foraging ecology.
Division of labor in insect societies relies on simple behavioral rules, whereby individual colony members respond to dynamic signals indicating the need for certain tasks to be performed. This in turn gives rise to colony-level phenotypes. However, empirical studies quantifying colony-level signal-response dynamics are lacking. Here, we make use of the unusual biology and experimental amenability of the queenless clonal raider ant Cerapachys biroi, to jointly quantify the behavioral and physiological responses of workers to a social signal emitted by larvae. Using automated behavioral quantification and oocyte size measurements in colonies of different sizes and with different worker to larvae ratios, we show that the workers in a colony respond to larvae by increasing foraging activity and inhibiting ovarian activation in a progressive manner, and that these responses are stronger in smaller colonies. This work adds to our knowledge of the processes that link plastic individual behavioral/physiological responses to colony-level phenotypes in social insect colonies.
Anima socia structure is shaped by environmenta conditions such as food avai abi ity This is important as conditions are ike y to change in the future and changes to socia structure can have cascading eco ogica effects Wood ants are a usefu taxon for the study of the re ationship between socia structure and envi ronmenta conditions as some popu ations form arge nest networks and they are eco ogica y dominant in many northern hemisphere wood ands Nest networks are formed when a co ony inhabits more than one nest known as po ydomy Po ydomous co onies are composed of distinct sub co onies that inhabit spatia y distinct nests and that share resources with each other In this study we performed a contro ed experiment on po ydomous wood ant (Formica lugubris co onies to test how changing the resource environment affects the socia structure of a po ydomous co ony We took network maps of a co onies for years before the experiment to assess how the networks changes under nat ura conditions After this period we prevented ants from accessing an important food source for a year in five co onies and eft the other five co onies undisturbed We found that preventing access to an important food source causes po ydomous wood ant co ony networks to fragment into sma er components and begin forag ing on previous y unused food sources These changes were not associated with a reduction in the growth of popu ations inhabiting individua nests sub co onies foundation of new nests or surviva when compared with contro co onies Co ony sp itting ike y occurred as the avai abi ity of food in each nest changed causing sub co onies to change their inter nest connections Consequent y our re su ts demonstrate that po ydomous co onies can adjust to environmenta changes by a tering their socia network KEYWORDS dynamic networks foraging eco ogy po ydomy resi ience socia network ana ysis wood ants This is an open access artic e under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits use distribution and reproduction in any medium provided the origina work is proper y cited The Authors Journal of Animal Ecology pub ished by John Wi ey Sons Ltd on beha f of British Eco ogica Society
1Sharing social information through recruitment can alter the outcome of collective decisions. 2We show that when ants share social information through recruitment, colonies consistently 3 choose a nest site that fluctuates between being good and bad over a constantly mediocre 4 alternative, even when the latter is only good for 25% of the time. This choice contrasts with 5 previous results showing colonies can accurately assess nest sites that fluctuate in quality 6 when recruitment is infrequent. 7The effect of social information on the collective choices of ant colonies 8 Abstract 9In collective decision-making, groups collate social information to inform their decisions. 10 Indeed, societies can gather more information than individuals-so social information can be 11 more reliable than private information. Colonies of Temnothorax albipennis can estimate the 12 average quality of fluctuating nest sites when the sharing of social information through 13 recruitment is rare. However, collective decisions in T. albipennis are often reached with the 14 use of recruitment. We use a new experimental set-up to test how colonies react to fluctuating 15 nest sites when they use recruitment to reach a decision. When recruitment is used colonies 16 consistently choose nest sites that fluctuate between being 'good' and 'poor' over constantly 17 'mediocre' alternatives. Moreover, they do so even if the fluctuating option is only 'good' for 18 25% of the time. The ants' preference for fluctuating nest sites appears to be due to tandem 19 running. Even if a nest site is only briefly 'good', scouts that experience it when it is 'good' 20 are likely to perform tandem runs to it. However, a constantly 'mediocre' nest site is unlikely 21 to ever provoke tandem runs. Consequently, the fluctuating nest sites attracted more tandem 22 runs, even when they were only 'good' for a short time. This led to quorum attainment in 23 fluctuating nest sites rather than in constant 'mediocre' nest sites. The results of this 24
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