Do honey bees modulate dance following according to foraging distance?

Hasenjager, Matthew J.; Hoppitt, William; Leadbeater, Ellouise

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2021.12.010

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…This filter arises through two potential mechanisms that are inherent properties of the dance communication system. Firstly, more distant forage sites take longer to reach, and so the number of hive visits per unit time reduces accordingly, such that the opportunities to dance are more limited (7). Secondly, it is well established that the number of dance circuits performed on a forager’s return to the hive is determined by the energetic efficiency of the trip (4).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1C), which is the nearest neighbour distance distribution for foragers operating in a one-dimensional environment (see Materials and Methods). Because scouts bias their dances so that sites offering higher net energetic gains are over-represented on the dancefloor (6), recruitment is more likely for closer sites (7,20), assuming that food distribution is unbiased with respect to distance from the hive. The distribution of the distances reported for recruit trips thus differs from that of scouts and is captured by a Rayleigh distribution (Fig.…”

Section: Figure 1 Simulating Honeybee Foraging In Our Simulation Mode...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A series of rules that determine when and how much bees dance (Fig. 1) mean that choices between feeding sites are made by the group (4)(5)(6). For example, because the number of dance circuits performed by a bee on returning from a food source reflects the net energetic benefits of the trip, more of the colony's workforce will be recruited to the richer of two equidistant sources (4), or the closer of two equally rich sources (6).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A series of rules that determine when and how much bees dance mean that choices between feeding sites are made by the group (4)(5)(6). For example, because the number of dance circuits performed by a bee on returning from a food source reflects the net energetic benefits of the trip, more of the colony's workforce will be recruited to the closer of two equally rich sources (7) or the richer of two equidistant sources (5). This filtered recruitment mechanism allows a colony to collectively allocate foraging effort adaptively without the need for any individual to compare resources.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Honeybees vary communication and collective decision making across landscapes

Palmer

Samuelson

Gill

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Honeybee (Apis mellifera) colony foraging decisions arise from the waggle dances of individual foragers, refined and filtered through a series of feedback loops that produce emergent collective behaviour. This process is a key example of animal communication at the height of eusociality, but a growing body of evidence suggests that its value for colony foraging success is heavily dependent on local ecology. Here, we develop a method to quantify the extent to which a colony forages collectively based on dance-decoding and show how it can be used to relate variation in collective foraging to land-use. We find that the extent to which colonies forage collectively varies across landscape types, such that it is sometimes almost entirely dominant but at other times almost negligible. By providing a means to identify the ecological conditions in which waggle dances are important on a large scale and without experimental manipulation, our methodology opens the door to exploration of the selection pressures that may have driven the evolution of this remarkable group behaviour.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Figure 1 Simulating Honeybee Foraging In Our Simulation Mode...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Honeybees vary communication and collective decision making across landscapes

Palmer

Samuelson

Gill

et al. 2022

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Indeed, bees very often ignore the spatial information altogether, following a dance but subsequently arriving at their own preferred site (Johnson 1967;Grüter et al 2008;Hasenjager et al 2020). When dancers do finally choose to seek out new sites, they engage in longer bouts of dance following (Grüter and Ratnieks 2011;Grüter et al 2013;Hasenjager et al 2022), presumably to obtain accurate spatial information. Dance-following, though critically important for locating the general vicinity of new foraging patches (Hasenjager et al 2020), thus often seems to serve as a backup information source for foragers that know of no alternative patches (e.g.…”

Section: The Waggle Dancementioning

confidence: 99%

From dyads to collectives: a review of honeybee signalling

Hasenjager

Franks

Leadbeater

2022

Behav Ecol Sociobiol

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The societies of honeybees (Apis spp.) are microcosms of divided labour where the fitness interests of individuals are so closely aligned that, in some contexts, the colony behaves as an entity in itself. Self-organization at this extraordinary level requires sophisticated communication networks, so it is not surprising that the celebrated waggle dance, by which bees share information about locations outside the hive, evolved here. Yet bees within the colony respond to several other lesser-known signalling systems, including the tremble dance, the stop signal and the shaking signal, whose roles in coordinating worker behaviour are not yet fully understood. Here, we firstly bring together the large but disparate historical body of work that has investigated the “meaning” of such signals for individual bees, before going on to discuss how network-based approaches can show how such signals function as a complex system to control the collective foraging effort of these remarkable social insect societies.

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In search of behavioral and brain processes involved in honey bee dance communication

Farina

2023

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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Honey bees represent an iconic model animal for studying the underlying mechanisms affecting advanced sensory and cognitive abilities during communication among colony mates. After von Frisch discovered the functional value of the waggle dance, this complex motor pattern led ethologists and neuroscientists to study its neural mechanism, behavioral significance, and implications for a collective organization. Recent studies have revealed some of the mechanisms involved in this symbolic form of communication by using conventional behavioral and pharmacological assays, neurobiological studies, comprehensive molecular and connectome analyses, and computational models. This review summarizes several critical behavioral and brain processes and mechanisms involved in waggle dance communication. We focus on the role of neuromodulators in the dancer and the recruited follower, the interneurons and their related processing in the first mechano-processing, and the computational navigation centers of insect brains.

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Do honey bees modulate dance following according to foraging distance?

Cited by 3 publications

References 34 publications

Honeybees vary communication and collective decision making across landscapes

Honeybees vary communication and collective decision making across landscapes

From dyads to collectives: a review of honeybee signalling

In search of behavioral and brain processes involved in honey bee dance communication

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