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

Abstract

SummaryNoise is universal in information transfer. In animal communication, this presents a challenge not only for intended signal receivers, but also to biologists studying the system. In honey bees, a forager communicates to nestmates the location of an important resource via the waggle dance. This vibrational signal is composed of repeating units (waggle runs) that are then averaged by nestmates to derive a single vector. Manual dance decoding is a powerful tool for studying bee foraging ecology, although the process is time-consuming: a forager may repeat the waggle run 1- >100 times within a dance. It is impractical to decode all of these to obtain the vector; however, intra-dance waggle runs vary, so it is important to decode enough to obtain a good average. Here we examine the variation among waggle runs made by foraging bees to devise a method of dance decoding. The first and last waggle runs within a dance are significantly more variable than the middle run. There was no trend in variation for the middle waggle runs. We recommend that any four consecutive waggle runs, not including the first and last runs, may be decoded, and we show that this methodology is suitable by demonstrating the goodness-of-fit between the decoded vectors from our subsamples with the vectors from the entire dances.

Dancing to her own beat: honey bee foragers communicate via individually calibrated waggle dances

“…We extracted and averaged for each dance the duration of four, consecutive, mid-dance waggle runs (Couvillon et al, 2012b). It is important to note that although we determined waggle run duration visually, the signal itself produced by the dancing bees is acoustic (Wenner, 1962;Esch, 1964).…”

“…Waggle dances are known to possess both intra-dance (within dance, between successive waggle runs) variation in both the distance and direction components (De Marco et al, 2008;Tanner and Visscher, 2010;Couvillon, 2012;Couvillon et al, 2012b;Preece and Beekman, 2014) and inter-dance (between dances) variation in the direction component (von Frisch and Lindauer, 1961;von Frisch, 1967;Schürch and Couvillon, 2013). However, less is known about interdance variation in the duration component (see descriptions of the phenomenon in Boch, 1957;Schweiger, 1958;von Frisch, 1967).…”

Ecosystem services mapping for municipal policy: ESTIMAP and zoning for urban beekeeping

“…Fortunately, honeybees' means of communicating foraging resource locations to other colony members via "waggle dances" provides us with a tool for estimating flight distances within a given landscape (von Frisch 1967, Couvillon et al 2012. The bees' dances encode a vector from the hive to the location of food resources, which researchers can recode using slow-motion films of dancing bees.…”

Honeybee linguistics—a comparative analysis of the waggle dance among species of Apis

“…We collected dance information from three colonies housed in observation hives at the University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, UK (50.51 • N, 0.05 • W) from August through to October 2009 (see Couvillon et al, 2012b for more details). We simultaneously video recorded dance activity on one side of a frame in each colony.…”