Summertime blues

Couvillon, Margaret J.; Fensome, Katherine A.; Quah, Shaun K. L.; Schürch, Roger

doi:10.4161/cib.28821

Cited by 28 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The period from the beginning of July to early August is generally the time of year when honey bee colonies in Minnesota gain the most weight and produce the most honey [79,80]. A nectar dearth period generally results in longer distances advertised [27,40,41,42]. Our results suggest that being close to a reconstructed prairie in the later season may provide a significant fitness benefit to colonies by allowing them to forage closer to home and expend less energy per trip at a time of year when they might otherwise have needed to travel much farther.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Diverse pollen sources help honey bees combat pathogens and parasites [20,21,22,23] and increase their ability to detoxify pesticides [24]. Colonies living in the temperate zone must respond to frequent changes in the species of blooming flowers from spring to fall [25,26] and may experience periods of dearth where temperatures remain high but few rewarding flowers bloom [27,28].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This relationship has been demonstrated multiple times with artificial sugar-water feeders [50,51,52], but so far has not been demonstrated with pollen or pollen substitutes ( [53] but see [54]). Multiple studies have also shown that colonies tend to advertise sites at greater distances in order to find profitable nectar sources during dearth periods [27,40,42,55].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2020

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Honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies are valued for the pollination services that they provide. However, colony mortality has increased to unsustainable levels in some countries, including the United States. Landscape conversion to monocrop agriculture likely plays a role in this increased mortality by decreasing the food sources available to honey bees. Many land owners and organizations in the Upper Midwest region of the United States would like to restore/reconstruct native prairie habitats. With increasing public awareness of high bee mortality, many landowners and beekeepers have wondered whether these restored prairies could significantly improve honey bee colony nutrition. Conveniently, honey bees have a unique communication signal called a waggle dance, which indicates the locations of the flower patches that foragers perceive as highly profitable food sources. We used these communication signals to answer two main questions: First, is there any part of the season in which the foraging force of a honey bee colony will devote a large proportion of its recruitment efforts (waggle dances) to flower patches within prairies? Second, will honey bee foragers advertise specific taxa of native prairie flowers as profitable pollen sources? We decoded 1528 waggle dances in colonies located near two large, reconstructed prairies. We also collected pollen loads from a subset of waggle-dancing bees, which we then analyzed to determine the flower taxon advertised. Most dances advertised flower patches outside of reconstructed prairies, but the proportion of dances advertising nectar sources within prairies increased significantly in the late summer/fall at one site. Honey bees advertised seven native prairie taxa as profitable pollen sources, although the three most commonly advertised pollen taxa were non-native. Our results suggest that including certain native prairie flower taxa in reconstructed prairies may increase the chances that colonies will use those prairies as major food sources during the period of greatest colony growth and honey production.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2020

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“…In our lab, we have trained honey bees to syrup feeders numerous times and have never been able to get them to visit feeders at great distances. In August, which is a month when foraging conditions are relatively poor (Couvillon et al, 2014c), the maximum was 1.28 km (Schürch et al, 2013), one tenth of what Lindauer achieved but close to what Dyer and Seeley (1991) achieved with A. dorsata.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 56%

Does the waggle dance help honey bees to forage at greater distances than expected for their body size?

Ratnieks

Shackleton

2015

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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A honey bee colony has been likened to an oil company. Some members of the company or colony prospect for valuable liquid resources. When these are discovered other group members can be recruited to exploit the resource. The recruitment of nestmates to a specific location where there is a patch of flowers should change the economics of scouting, that is, the search for new resource patches. In particular, communication is predicted to make scouting at longer distances worthwhile because a profitable resource patch, once discovered, will enhance the foraging not only of the discoverer but also of nestmates that can be directed to the patch. By virtue of having large colonies and dance communication, honey bees are predicted to be able to profitably scout, and hence forage, at greater distances from the nest than either solitary bees or social bees without communication. We test this hypothesis by first examining existing data on foraging distance to evaluate whether honey bees do indeed forage at greater distances than other bees given their body size. Second, we present a simple cost-benefit analysis of scouting which indicates that communication causes longer range scouting to be more profitable. Overall, our analyses are supportive, but not conclusive, that honey bees forage further than would be expected given their size and that the waggle dance is a cause of the honey bee's exceptional foraging range.

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“…There are, however, costs when using social information that do not exist when using other foraging strategies (memory or searching for new food sources) (Giraldeau et al, 2002;Grüter and Leadbeater, 2014). Recruited individuals often fail to find the advertised food source and must return to the colony to receive more information (Seeley and Visscher, 1988;Couvillon et al, 2014;Grüter and Leadbeater, 2014). Such failures are both temporally and energetically expensive.…”

Section: Ecological Context: When Is Dance Communication Beneficial?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Why, when and where did honey bee dance communication evolve?

Price

Grüter

2015

Front. Ecol. Evol.

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Honey bees (Apis sp.) are the only known bee genus that uses nest-based communication to provide nest-mates with information about the location of resources, the so-called "dance language." Successful foragers perform waggle dances for high quality food sources and, when swarming, suitable nest-sites. However, since many species of social insects do not communicate the location of resources to their nest-mates, the question of why the "dance language" evolved in honey bees is of ongoing interest. We review recent theoretical and empirical research into the ecological circumstances that make dance communication beneficial in present day environments. This research suggests that the "dance language" is most beneficial when food sources differ greatly in quality and are hard to find. The dances of extant honey bee species differ in important ways, and phylogenetic studies suggest an increase in dance complexity over time: species with the least complex dance were the first to appear and species with the most complex dance are the most derived. We review the fossil record of honey bees and speculate about the time and context (foraging vs. swarming) in which spatially referential dance communication might have evolved. We conclude that there are few certainties about when the "dance language" first appeared; dance communication could be older than 40 million years and, thus, predate the genus Apis, or it could be as recent as 20 million years when extant honey bee species diverged during the early Miocene. The most parsimonious scenario assumes it evolved in a sub-tropical to temperate climate with patchy vegetation, somewhere in Eurasia.

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Summertime blues

Cited by 28 publications

References 12 publications

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

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

Does the waggle dance help honey bees to forage at greater distances than expected for their body size?

Why, when and where did honey bee dance communication evolve?

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