Do honeybees have two discrete dances to advertise food sources?
Section snippets
Recording and Analysing Dances
Three unrelated colonies (A, B and C) were maintained in observation hives, as described by Seeley (1995, chapter 4). Working with one colony at a time, we trained foragers to a sugar water feeder at 10 distances (10, 30, 50, 70, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400 and 500 m) according to the methods of von Frisch (1967). Dances of individually marked bees were recorded upon their return to the hive. We recorded 15–21 dances per colony per distance (572 dances total) using a Sony mini-DV camcorder
Distance Information
Waggle phases were present in all recorded dances for food sources between 10 and 500 m from the hive. Figure 2 shows that in all three colonies there was a clear pattern of steady increase in waggle-phase duration with increasing food-source distance.
Over the distance range of the round dance, 10–100 m, there was a significant effect of colony on waggle-phase duration (F2,142 = 13.24, P < 0.0001); therefore, the results (parameter estimates and associated statistics) for each colony are presented
Discussion
Ever since its discovery by Karl von Frisch, the honeybee's dance language has captivated the attention of scientists from a range of disciplines. Furthermore, the initial terminology put forth by von Frisch to describe this communication behaviour has been broadly adopted. This study has investigated the long-standing view that there are two discrete dances, what von Frisch called the round dance and the waggle dance. Currently, it is widely believed that these are separate ‘words’ in the
Acknowledgments
We thank Giles Hooker and Françoise Vermeylen for statistical consultation and Florio Arguillas and the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER) for assistance with the SAS program used to calculate Markov transition probabilities. Alicia Koral, Michael Ryskin and Bethany Schiller provided invaluable assistance in collecting data. This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (Hatch grant NYC-191407 to T.D.S.) and by a grant from the New York State
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