Floral scents affect the distribution of hive bees around dancers

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Version: author
Serval ID
serval:BIB_F17AA276D041
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Title
Floral scents affect the distribution of hive bees around dancers
Journal
Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
Author(s)
Díaz P.C., Grüter C., Farina W.
ISSN
1432-0762 (Electronic)
ISSN-L
0340-5443 (Print)
Publication state
Published
Issued date
2007
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
61
Number
10
Pages
1589-1597
Language
english
Abstract
Floral scents are important information cues used to organize foraging-related tasks in honeybees. The waggle dance, apart from encoding spatial information about food sources, might facilitate the transfer of olfactory information by increasing the dissipation of volatiles brought back by successful foragers. By assuming that food scents are more intensive on specific body parts of returning foragers, i.e., the posterior legs of pollen foragers and mouthparts of nectar foragers, we quantified the interactions between hive mates and foragers during dances advertising different types of food sources. For natural sources, a higher proportion of hive mates contacted the hind legs of pollen dancers (where the pollen loads were located) with their heads compared to non-pollen dancers. On the other hand, the proportion of head-to-head contacts was higher for non-pollen foragers during the waggle runs. When the food scent was manipulated, dancers collecting scented sugar solution had a higher proportion of head-to-head contacts and a lower proportion around their hind legs compared to dancers collecting unscented solution. The presence of food odors did not affect in-hive behaviors of dancers, but it increased the number of trophallaxes in-between waggle runs (i.e., during circle phases). These results suggest that the honeybee dance facilitates the olfactory information transfer between incoming foragers and hive mates, and we propose that excitatory displays in other social insect species serve the same purpose. While recent empirical and theoretical findings suggested that the colony level foraging benefits of the spatial information encoded in the waggle dance vary seasonally and with habitats, the role of the dance as a compound signal not only indicating the presence of a profitable resource but also amplifying the information transfer regarding floral odors may be important under any ecological circumstances.
Keywords
Apis mellifera, waggle dance, floral scent, information transfer, trophallaxis
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Create date
21/02/2014 11:12
Last modification date
20/08/2019 17:18
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