The waggle dance of the honey bee: Which bees following a dancer successfully acquire the information?

Judd, Timothy M.

doi:10.1007/bf01989363

Cited by 60 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Consequently, bees following short dances may have had too little time to orient during the waggle phase of the dance and spent proportionally longer to the rear of the dancer while she was transitioning between consecutive waggle phases. The methods employed by Judd (1995) not withstanding, this "follow behind" hypothesis is supported by many studies showing that information is communicated by dancer bees using near field sound emitted by the wings to follower bees that are oriented close behind abdomen of a dancer bee (Michelsen et al, 1987(Michelsen et al, , 1992Rohrseitz and Tautz, 1999;Kirchner 1993;Michelsen, 2003). In this study, we identify the behaviors that aid in the collection of dance information by examining the dance following behaviors of successful recruits.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…While the mechanics of the dance and its varied dialects are well understood, little is known about what behaviors dance followers perform to facilitate the transfer of information. Some data suggest that the angle of a follower bee's body relative to that of the dancer affects the Corresponding author: D. Tanner, dtanner@biology.usu.edu * Manuscript editor: Stan Schneider efficiency of interpreting the location of the resource (Bozic and Valentincic, 1991;Judd, 1995). Bozic and Valentincic (1991) report that bees located to the side of a dancer bee remain in contact longer than those that locate behind, and they suggest that the direction to the resource is received through antennal contact by the follower bee with the dancer bee's body.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Conversely, Judd (1995) suggested that only follower bees behind the dancer bee are successful at acquiring sufficient information to arrive at the indicated resource. In this experiment, Judd noted where all follower bees were located relative to a dancing bee advertising a feeder offering a rich sucrose solution, and reported that only bees that followed the dancer bee within a 30…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Does the body orientation of waggle dance followers affect the accuracy of recruitment?

Tanner

Visscher

2008

Apidologie

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-The honey bee waggle dance is a cascade of behaviors used to advertise the availability of a resource, and communicate its location. Little is known, however, about the behaviors of dance follower bees that allow them to extract information from the dance. We test competing hypotheses that suggest that either follower bees must be located behind a dancer bee or to the side of a dancer bee to be able to extract information from the dance. We also test if behaviors relating to the time that a follower bee spends following a dance are important in collecting dance information. We find that the bees are equally efficient finding a resource indicated by the dance after following a dance from the side or behind a dancer bee. We also find that the number of waggle runs followed has a significant effect on the accuracy of a foraging flight.honey bee / Apis mellifera / waggle dance / dance follower behavior

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Does the body orientation of waggle dance followers affect the accuracy of recruitment?

Tanner

Visscher

2008

Apidologie

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“…It is not clear whether successful recruits need to follow more or less than eight circuits of a recruiting ''round'' waggle to find nearby sites with the same degree of success, but it is interesting that the average number of circuits followed by dance followers in this study hovers around this 8-circuit mark (Fig. 1b), the threshold number of informative waggle signals shown by Judd (1995) to promote successful food-site discovery by dance-following recruits. Furthermore, calculated across concentrations, the average number of circuits followed in single-patriline colonies was less than eight per follower.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 78%

“…Foragers who successfully locate a food source that is advertised by a waggle dance need to follow a mean of at least eight waggle runs of a dance to obtain sufficient information about the location of that resource (Judd, 1995). The same information about distance and direction that is encoded in waggle dances for faraway food sites is also found in so-called ''round dances'' (i.e.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recruitment-dance signals draw larger audiences when honey bee colonies have multiple patrilines

2010

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Honey bee queens (Apis mellifera) who mate with multiple males produce colonies that are filled with numerous genetically distinct patrilines of workers. A genetically diverse colony benefits from an enhanced foraging effort, fuelled in part by an increase in the number of recruitment signals that are produced by foragers. However, the influence of patriline diversity on the attention paid to these signals by audiences of potentially receptive workers remains unexplored. To determine whether recruitment dances performed by foragers in multiple-patriline colonies attract a greater number of dance followers than dances in colonies that lack patriline diversity, we trained workers from multiple-and singlepatriline colonies to forage in a greenhouse and monitored their dance-following activity back in the hives. On average, more workers followed a dance if it was performed in a multiple-patriline colony rather than a single-patriline colony (33% increase), and for a greater number of dance circuits per follower. Furthermore, dance-following workers in multiple-patriline colonies were more likely to exit their hive after following a dance, although this did not translate to a difference in colony-level exit rates between treatment types. Recruiting nest mates to profitable food sources through dance communication is critical to a colony's foraging success and long-term fitness; polyandrous queens produce colonies that benefit not only from increased recruitment signalling, but also from the generation of larger and more attentive audiences of signal receivers. This study highlights the importance of integrating responses of both signal senders and receivers to understand more fully the success of animal-communication systems.

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Morphological analysis of the primary center receiving spatial information transferred by the waggle dance of honeybees

Hagio

2013

J of Comparative Neurology

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The waggle dancers of honeybees encodes roughly the distance and direction to the food source as the duration of the waggle phase and the body angle during the waggle phase. It is believed that hive-mates detect airborne vibrations produced during the waggle phase to acquire distance information and simultaneously detect the body axis during the waggle phase to acquire direction information. It has been further proposed that the orientation of the body axis on the vertical comb is detected by neck hairs (NHs) on the prosternal organ. The afferents of the NHs project into the prothoracic and mesothoracic ganglia and the dorsal subesophageal ganglion (dSEG). This study demonstrates somatotopic organization within the dSEG of the central projections of the mechanosensory neurons of the NHs. The terminals of the NH afferents in dSEG are in close apposition to those of Johnston's organ (JO) afferents. The sensory axons of both terminate in a region posterior to the crossing of the ventral intermediate tract (VIT) and the maxillary dorsal commissures I and III (MxDCI, III) in the subesophageal ganglion. These features of the terminal areas of the NH and JO afferents are common to the worker, drone, and queen castes of honeybees. Analysis of the spatial relationship between the NH neurons and the morphologically and physiologically characterized vibration-sensitive interneurons DL-Int-1 and DL-Int-2 demonstrated that several branches of DL-Int-1 are in close proximity to the central projection of the mechanosensory neurons of the NHs in the dSEG.

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The waggle dance of the honey bee: Which bees following a dancer successfully acquire the information?

Cited by 60 publications

References 8 publications

Does the body orientation of waggle dance followers affect the accuracy of recruitment?

Does the body orientation of waggle dance followers affect the accuracy of recruitment?

Recruitment-dance signals draw larger audiences when honey bee colonies have multiple patrilines

Morphological analysis of the primary center receiving spatial information transferred by the waggle dance of honeybees

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