Schwarmbienen auf Wohnungssuche

Cognition in Invertebrates

“…There is also no evidence yet that honeybees employ chain communication whereby an animal picks up on the received information without experiencing itself the primary signals inducing the dance. In his studies of dance communication within a swarm, Lindauer (1955) did not observe a bee changing its dance pattern until it had actually visited the second cavity, and these observations were verified more recently by Visscher and Camazine (1999), who observed no higher attraction of bees to dances which indicated the same location as the one for which they had previously been dancing. The authors also found that it takes a swarm longer to get started with the flight to a new nest site if the decision must be made between alternative nest sites, and they present arguments for some form of collective ''quorum sensing'' (Seeley and Visscher, 2004; see also below).…”

The Natural History of the Flight ofHoney Bee Swarms

“…Moreover, buzzing runs have been observed in two other contexts involved in swarming--when a swarm first leaves its nest, and later when a swarm lifts off from its interim cluster site; and in both cases the buzzing runs seem to signal "Let's go!" (Lindauer 1955, Martin 1963).…”

“…A fraction of the scout bees in the Appledore Island swarm were labelled before the swarm's first flight by painting a blue dot on every bee that danced for our nestbox. The paint was shellac mixed with artist's pigment, as described by von Frisch (1967 (Lindauer 1955, Seeley 1977 suggested that once a swarm has decided which nest to occupy, the next step in the swarm movement process is the return of the scouts at the nest site to the swarm cluster. To document this phenomenon we made a count every 30 sec, starting 75 min before the swarm lifted off, of the number of scouting bees visible at the nest site.…”

Deciding on a new home: how do honeybees agree?

“…Scouts leave the swarm and individually search for a tree hole or similar cavity as a suitable new home for the colony. If they find a potentially suitable nest-site, they measure a suite of its characteristics, and represent their overall enthusiasm for that site in the vigour of their dance back on the surface of the swarm (Lindauer 1955(Lindauer , 1961Seeley & Buhrman 1999). Their dance not only advertises the quality of the nest-site, but also indicates its distance and direction to other potential scouts, who may also go to that site and in turn advertise its charms through vigorous dances.…”