Does the body orientation of waggle dance followers affect the accuracy of recruitment?

Abstract

-The honey bee waggle dance is a cascade of behaviors used to advertise the availability of a resource, and communicate its location. Little is known, however, about the behaviors of dance follower bees that allow them to extract information from the dance. We test competing hypotheses that suggest that either follower bees must be located behind a dancer bee or to the side of a dancer bee to be able to extract information from the dance. We also test if behaviors relating to the time that a follower bee spends following a dance are important in collecting dance information. We find that the bees are equally efficient finding a resource indicated by the dance after following a dance from the side or behind a dancer bee. We also find that the number of waggle runs followed has a significant effect on the accuracy of a foraging flight.honey bee / Apis mellifera / waggle dance / dance follower behavior

Do honey bee (Apis mellifera) foragers recruit their nestmates to native forbs in reconstructed prairie habitats?

“…The greater number of waggle runs indicates that foragers invested more energy into recruiting other foragers during this period, which could result from foragers perceiving July nectar sources as more profitable or perceiving a greater colony need for or ability to store nectar during July [72]. Recruits that follow more waggle runs are significantly more likely to find a food source [73] so an average increase of 7-9 waggle runs in July could potentially lead to an average higher recruitment success per dance. Because each recruit will likely also dance, this perdance difference in waggle runs would likely increase recruitment to that site exponentially as more foragers advertise it [74].…”

Intra-dance variation among waggle runs and the design of efficient protocols for honey bee dance decoding

“…communicate foraging locations to nestmates via the waggle dance (von Frisch, 1946; von Frisch, 1967), researchers have studied many aspects of the dance language. Some of these aspects have included mechanisms and evolution of message production (Seeley et al, 2000; Dornhaus and Chittka, 2004; Couvillon, 2012); message reception (Riley et al, 2005; Tanner and Visscher, 2008; Tanner and Visscher, 2009); the role of odour, memory, and acoustics (Kirchner et al, 1988; Reinhard et al, 2004; Grüter and Ratnieks, 2011); and how honey bees measure distance (Srinivasan et al, 2000; Esch et al, 2001; Chittka and Tautz, 2003; Tautz et al, 2004). Additionally, the dance has been used as a tool to investigate honey bee foraging ecology (von Frisch, 1967; Visscher and Seeley, 1982; Waddington et al, 1994; Seeley, 1995; Beekman and Ratnieks, 2000; Steffan-Dewenter and Kuhn, 2003; Beekman et al, 2004; Seeley and Visscher, 2004).…”

The dance legacy of Karl von Frisch

“…Recruits may also play a role in reducing imprecision. Followers of the dance may be located either behind or alongside a dancer (Tanner and Visscher, 2009) and are known to follow a variable number of waggle runs. However, the number of followed waggle runs positively correlates with increased foraging flight accuracy (Tanner and Visscher, 2009).…”

“…Followers of the dance may be located either behind or alongside a dancer (Tanner and Visscher, 2009) and are known to follow a variable number of waggle runs. However, the number of followed waggle runs positively correlates with increased foraging flight accuracy (Tanner and Visscher, 2009). Additionally, it appears that dance followers ''average'', which is a common method by which noise is reduced, the information from successive waggle runs (Tanner and Visscher, 2008), resulting in a vector that is as precise to the goal as if there were no divergence angle.…”