You would be hard pressed to find a Biology student that has never heard about the honeybee waggle dance. The waggle dance is a well-studied and sophisticated example of animal communication, that has been well-studied over the last forty years. Honeybee foragers use the waggle-run portion of their dance to communicate information about direction, distance, and the profitability of a patch of forage. Honeybees also will perform a circle dance, which conveys information that a food source is near enough for other foragers to use an olfactory gradient to find it. A recent study by Abbot and Dukas at McMaster University shows that honeybees also convey information about ‘dangerous’ flowers in their dance.
Abbot and Dukas trained honeybees to visit two equally profitable artificial flowers. The flowers were placed approximately 250 meters from the colony, and about 60 meter apart. One flower was considered safe, while the other flower contained a cue for predation risk. They cued for the predation risk by placing two recently killed bees on the experimental flower, but they were placed so that they would not interfere with other forager bees. Trials were run on warm days, and the amount of foragers near each flowers were equalized before the trial began. Eight trials were run for a duration of thirty minutes each, and observers at the flowers notified hive observers when an individual bee spent more than one full minute at the flower. The hive observers recorded the number of waggle runs performed by the focal bees.
The results of this study were clear. On average, the bees returning from safe flowers performed about 20 times more waggle runs than bees returning from waggle runs. This was consistent with previous findings that honeybees avoid flowers associated with danger, and that experienced foragers will steer naïve foragers away from the ‘dangerous’ flowers. This study shows that honeybee dances convey information about predation risk and patch profitability into their number of waggle runs, and are an even more complex and effective method of communication than we could have guessed.
Abbott, K. R. & Dukas, R. 2009. Honeybees consider flower danger in their waggle dance. Animal Behaviour 78:633-635
Posted by Heather Gore
Waggle dances seem like a very complicated and detailed area of study.
ReplyDeleteAre there any other ways that honeybees communicate danger besides waggle-dancing, such as by a certain frequency of wing-flapping? Also, do other types of bees use waggle dances to communicate danger, or is that characteristic specific to honey bees?
Posted by Bethany Rappleyea
Do the authors note if they ran this experiment in different conditions, would the result change? For example, if resources were low and the 'dangerous' flower had more resources than the 'safe' one, would the bees waggle dance in similar frequencies? Would they take that risk of possible death to get more resources? This study is really impressive to read about. I bet that even this well studied behavior will elicit many more studies in the future.
ReplyDeletePosted by Christine Rega
This is a very interesting article. I have read about the waggle dance but I never knew they used it for predator avoidance. What other signals does the waggle dance produce. Do the dead bees in the flower signal the other bees that their is a predator present and in response they do the waggle dance to warn other bees? Nice article.
ReplyDeletePosted by: Carlos Varela
It's so interesting how lots of information can be encoded by a dance. It's also amazing how complex the dances are but the bees don't seem to have an issue knowing what to do to get their information across.
ReplyDeleteHow long is a dangeous flower labelled dangerous? Will the bees remember that there were dead bees there after the bodies are gone or is it then considered a safe flower again? More research on this subject would be really interesting. I bet a lot of great experiments based off of this could be created.
-Tricia Carlson
Christine makes a good point in her comment regarding availability of resources. I wonder if the honeybees could convey information about the fact that predation is a threat. They encode so much information in these displays that it seems possible. If only "dangerous" flowers were available, could they change their strategy and communicate that threat effectively. Or is it just simply an announcement of a resource or the absence of an announcement (as in more experienced foragers steering the new-bees (ha) away from danger)?
ReplyDeletePosted by Jess Bouchard (1)
It's amazing that a bee can say so much with a dance. I wonder what the signal is for "this flower is dangerous; stay away from it." Did the article say anything about how long it took for the number of bees visiting the "dangerous" flower to drop well below the number of bees visiting the safe flower? It would be interesting to find out how quickly the message can make its way through the hive so that all the foragers know to avoid this flower.
ReplyDelete-Sarah Benjamin
This is really interesting. I remember learning about the waggle dance and how they can communicate the direction and how far a flower is. How exactly does the danger signal differ. Do they do a similar dance and then just add a part to say that the flower is dangerous? You said that they do less waggle runs for the dangerous flower, but wouldn't they still have to tell how far away it is and the direction so that the other bees know exactly where the danger is?
ReplyDelete-Tara Quist