Numerous activities within honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies rely on feedback loops for organization at the group level. Classic examples of these self-organizing behaviors occur during foraging and swarm nest site selection. The waggle dance provides positive feedback, promoting foraging at a specific location or increased scouting at a potential nest site. Rather less well known than the waggle dance is the stop signal, a short vibration often delivered while butting against a dancing bee. It is currently best understood as a counter to the waggle dance, offering negative feedback toward the advertised foraging location or nest site. When the stop signal is received by a waggle dancer she is more likely to terminate her dance early and retire from the dance floor. Bees that experienced danger or overcrowding at a food source are more likely to perform the stop signal upon their return to the colony, resulting in an inhibition of foraging at that location. During a swarm's nest site selection process, scout bees that visited a different site than the one being advertised are more likely to stop-signal the waggle dancer than are scouts that had visited the same site. Over time, the scout bees build recruitment to a single site until a quorum is reached and the swarm can move to it. The balance between the positive feedback from the waggle dance and the negative feedback from the stop signal allows for a more sensitive adjustment of response from the colony as a unit. Many of the processes associated with the feedback loops organizing a honey bee colony's activities are in striking parallel to other systems, such as intercellular interactions involved in motor neuron function.

Honey bees (Linnaeus, Hymenoptera: Apidae) are widely used as commercial pollinators and commonly forage in agricultural and urban landscapes containing neonicotinoid-treated plants. Previous research has demonstrated that honey bees display adverse behavioral and cognitive effects after treatment with sublethal doses of neonicotinoids. In laboratory studies, honey bees simultaneously increase their proportional intake of neonicotinoid-treated solutions and decrease their total solution consumption to some concentrations of certain neonicotinoids. These findings suggest that neonicotinoids might elicit a suboptimal response in honey bees, in which they forage preferentially on foods containing pesticides, effectively increasing their exposure, while also decreasing their total food intake; however, behavioral responses in semifield and field conditions are less understood. Here we conducted a feeder experiment with freely flying bees to determine the effects of a sublethal, field-realistic concentration of imidacloprid (IMD) on the foraging and recruitment behaviors of honey bees visiting either a control feeder containing a sucrose solution or a treatment feeder containing the same sucrose solution with IMD. We report that IMD-treated honey bees foraged less frequently (–28%) and persistently (–66%) than control foragers. Recruitment behaviors (dance frequency and dance propensity) also decreased with IMD, but nonsignificantly. Our results suggest that neonicotinoids inhibit honey bee foraging, which could potentially decrease food intake and adversely affect colony health.

Numerous activities within honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies rely on feedback loops for organization at the group level. Many of the processes associated with the feedback loops organizing a honey bee colony's activities are in striking parallel to other systems, such as intercellular interactions involved in motor neuron function, and principles derived from their study can be applied to these diverse fields, among others. This study looked at the communication signals honey bees employ while provisioning their nest with food to assess whether or not the bees use signals when their hive has no more available storage space. In this experiment, the storage space was alternated each day between no available space and ample space. The communication signals used by the bees were counted during each treatment and compared. When the hive had no storage space available, significantly more stop signals, which inhibit foraging, and tremble dances, which recruit more bees to unload incoming foragers, were observed. This suggests that the bees had noted the absence of storage space and were modifying their communication accordingly.

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