The honey bee's tremble dance stimulates additional bees to function as nectar receivers

Abstract

If a forager bee returns to her hive laden with high-quality nectar but then experiences difficulty finding a receiver bee to unload her, she will begin to produce a conspicuous communication signal called the tremble dance. The context in which this signal is produced suggests that it serves to stimulate more bees to function as nectar receivers, but so far there is no direct evidence of this effect. We now report an experiment which shows that more bees do begin to function as nectar receivers when foragers produce tremble dances. When we stimulated the production of tremble dances in a colony and counted the number of bees engaged in nectar reception before and after the period of intense tremble dancing, we found a dramatic increase. In two trials, the number of nectar receivers rose from 17% of the colony's population before tremble dancing to 30-50% of the population after the dancing. We also investigated which bees become the additional nectar receivers, by looking at the age composition of the receiver bees before and after the period of intense tremble dancing. We found that none of the bees recruited to the task of nectar reception were old bees, most were middle-aged bees, and some were even young bees. It remains unclear whether these auxiliary nectar receivers were previously inactive (as a reserve supply of labor) or were previously active on other tasks. Overall, this study demonstrates that a honey bee colony is able to rapidly and strongly alter its allocation of labor to adapt to environmental changes, and it further documents one of the communication mechanisms underlying this ability.

Modelling collective foraging by means of individual behaviour rules in honey-bees

“…Another interesting feature that could be included in the model is the ®nding that returning forager bees perform tremble dances. These tremble dances, which are performed throughout the hive (Seeley 1992), serve to stimulate additional bees to function as nectar receivers (Seeley et al 1996). If the search time for a nectar receiver becomes greater than about 40 s, the probability that the nectar forager will perform a tremble dance increases quickly, at least if the pro®tability of her known source is high enough (Seeley 1992;Kirchner and Lindauer 1994).…”

Organization of work in the honeybee: a compromise between division of labour and behavioural flexibility

“…The percentage of their remaining time spent on physiology-dependent versus physiology-independent tasks remains unclear, but is probably dependent on the amount of nectar influx into the colony. When the amount of nectar influx is high, middle-age bees are thought to spend most of their time nectar processing, in contrast to when it is low, when they spend more time on other tasks (Seeley et al 1996). Wax working is the most common of these other tasks ( Johnson 2002) and is physiology-independent because most wax workers do not have active wax glands (Pratt 1997 bees are less active than middle-age bees and spend proportionally more of their time shaping and manipulating wax than nursing, their physiology-dependent task (Seeley 1995).…”

“…Lond. B (2003) ony's nectar influx followed those of Seeley et al (1996) to control nectar influx and the methods of Johnson (2002) for data collection. Observations of bees trimming brood cells within the brood nest were collected using scans of individually marked workers in unstressed colonies.…”

Performance Analyzes of Bee Colony Split-Plot Algorithm

“…This dance is essential for colony communication, and contains three pieces of information regarding a flower patch: the direction in which it will be found, its distance from the hive and its quality rating (or fitness) [13]. This Vol.…”

“…Scout bees move randomly from one patch to another. During the harvesting season, a colony continues its exploration, keeping a percentage of the population as scout bees [13].…”