Do honey bees tune error in their dances in nectar-foraging and house-hunting?

Tanner, David A.; Visscher, Kirk

doi:10.1007/s00265-005-0082-z

Cited by 28 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…With only a few exceptions (e.g. Haldane and Spurway, 1954;Esch, 1978;Weidenmüller and Seeley, 1999;Beekman et al, 2005;Tanner and Visscher, 2006), variations in a dancer's manoeuvres are rarely discussed in the context of information transfer, even when it is unclear whether and to what extend followers average information from multiple waggle phases. Certainly, it is the variability of a dancer's motion display that initially defines the boundaries of the stimulation that followers must cope with if they are to successfully decode information in the dance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variability in the encoding of spatial information by dancing bees

Marco

Gurevitz

Menzel

2008

Journal of Experimental Biology

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SUMMARYA honeybee's waggle dance is an intriguing example of multisensory convergence, central processing and symbolic information transfer. It conveys to bees and human observers the position of a relatively small area at the endpoint of an average vector in a two-dimensional system of coordinates. This vector is often computed from a collection of waggle phases from the same or different dancers. The question remains, however, of how informative a small sample of waggle phases can be to the bees, and how the spatial information encoded in the dance is actually mapped to the followers' searches in the field. Certainly, it is the variability of a dancer's performance that initially defines the level of uncertainty that followers must cope with if they were to successfully decode information in the dance. Understanding how a dancer's behaviour is mapped to that of its followers initially relies on the analysis of both the accuracy and precision with which the dancer encodes spatial information in the dance. Here we describe within-individual variations in the encoding of the distance to and direction of a goal. We show that variations in the number of a dancer's wagging movements, a measure that correlates well with the distance to the goal, do not depend upon the dancer's travelled distance, meaning that there is a constant variance of wagging movements around the mean. We also show that the duration of the waggle phases and the angular dispersion and divergence of successive waggle phases co-vary with a dancer's orientation in space. Finally, using data from dances recorded through high-speed video techniques, we present the first analysis of the accuracy and precision with which an increasing number of waggle phases conveys spatial information to a human observer.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variability in the encoding of spatial information by dancing bees

Marco

Gurevitz

Menzel

2008

Journal of Experimental Biology

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“…Stochastic effects and individual variation are inherent in nest-site choice by honeybees. Bees can make reliable decisions with different levels of variability in their dances (Tanner & Visscher 2006) and the model suggests that the process is most accurate when choosing between poorer sites. Since a fully deterministic process can, in principle, produce acceptable results (Myerscough 2003), the question becomes: does randomness confer any advantage in decision making or is this merely the best that bees can do?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making good choices with variable information: a stochastic model for nest-site selection by honeybees

Perdriau

Myerscough

2007

Biol. Lett.

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A density-dependent Markov process model is constructed for information transfer among scouts during nest-site selection by honeybees (Apis mellifera). The effects of site quality, competition between sites and delays in site discovery are investigated. The model predicts that bees choose the better of two sites more reliably when both sites are of low quality than when both sites are of high quality and that delay in finding a second site has most effect on the final choice when both sites are of high quality. The model suggests that stochastic effects in honeybee nest-site selection confer no advantage on the swarm.

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“…Thus, if anything, cavity-nesting bees should increase the precision of their dance when dancing for nest sites if they are capable of doing so (tuned-error), or at least dance with the same precision (constraint). Towne (1985, cited in Tanner andVisscher, 2006) and Tanner and Visscher (2006) found no difference in angular deviation in dances for nest sites and nectar. In contrast Weidenmüller and Seeley (1999) did find that nest-site dances were more precise, but their results were later shown to be due to dance substrate and not dance context (Tanner and Visscher, 2006).…”

Section: Frontiers In Ecology and Evolution | Behavioral And Evolutiomentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Towne (1985, cited in Tanner andVisscher, 2006) and Tanner and Visscher (2006) found no difference in angular deviation in dances for nest sites and nectar. In contrast Weidenmüller and Seeley (1999) did find that nest-site dances were more precise, but their results were later shown to be due to dance substrate and not dance context (Tanner and Visscher, 2006). We think our results too can be explained by dance substrate.…”

Section: Frontiers In Ecology and Evolution | Behavioral And Evolutiomentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Initially the argument was made that the bees adaptively "tune" their error so that the dance always advertises a patch of similar size irrespective of distance (Haldane and Spurway, 1954;Towne and Gould, 1988). More recently, however, it has become clear the bees dance as best they can (Preece and Beekman, 2014) but that the precision of the dance is influenced by the substrate the bees dance on (Tanner and Visscher, 2006), context (forage or nest sites) (Tanner and Visscher, 2006), point of reference used (gravity or visual) (Tanner and Visscher, 2010), and angle of the waggle phase relative to vertical (Couvillon et al, 2012a).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Honeybee linguisticsâ€”a comparative analysis of the waggle dance among species of Apis

et al. 2015

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All honeybees use the waggle dance to recruit nestmates. Studies on the dance precision of Apis mellifera have shown that the dance is often imprecise. Two hypotheses have been put forward aimed at explaining this imprecision. The first argues that imprecision in the context of foraging is adaptive as it ensures that the dance advertises the same patch size irrespective of distance. The second argues that the bees are constrained in their ability to be more precise, especially when the source is nearby. Recent studies have found support for the latter hypothesis but not for the "tuned-error" hypothesis, as the adaptive hypothesis became known. Here we investigate intra-dance variation among Apis species. We analyse the dance precision of A. florea, A. dorsata, and A. mellifera in the context of foraging and swarming. A. mellifera performs forage dances in the dark, using gravity as point of reference, and in the light when dancing for nest sites, using the sun as point of reference. Both A. dorsata and A. florea are open-nesting species; they do not use a different point of reference depending on context. A. florea differs from both A. mellifera and A. dorsata in that it dances on a horizontal surface and does not use gravity but instead "points" directly toward the goal when indicating direction. Previous work on A. mellifera has suggested that differences in dance orientation and point of reference can affect dance precision. We find that all three species improve dance precision with increasing waggle phase duration, irrespective of differences in dance orientation, and point of reference. When dancing for sources nearby, dances are highly variable. When the distance increases, dance precision converges. The exception is dances performed by A. mellifera on swarms. Here, dance precision decreases as the distance increases. We also show that the size of the patch advertised increases with increasing distance, contrary to what is predicted under the tuned-error hypothesis.

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Do honey bees tune error in their dances in nectar-foraging and house-hunting?

Cited by 28 publications

References 9 publications

Variability in the encoding of spatial information by dancing bees

Variability in the encoding of spatial information by dancing bees

Making good choices with variable information: a stochastic model for nest-site selection by honeybees

Honeybee linguisticsâ€”a comparative analysis of the waggle dance among species of Apis

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