Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 75, Issue 4, April 2008, Pages 1291-1300
Animal Behaviour

Do honeybees have two discrete dances to advertise food sources?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2007.09.032Get rights and content

The honeybee, Apis mellifera, dance language, used to communicate the location of profitable food resources, is one of the most versatile forms of nonprimate communication. Karl von Frisch described this communication system in terms of two distinct dances: (1) the round dance, which indicates the presence of a desirable food source close to the hive but does not provide information about its direction and (2) the waggle dance, which indicates the presence of a desirable food source more than 100 m from the hive and its provides information about both its distance and its direction. The view that honeybees have two discrete recruitment dances has been widely accepted since its inception in the 1920s. However, there are few detailed examinations of the behavioural parameters of dances over the range of food-source distances represented by round dances and waggle dances. Here, we show that both the round dance and the waggle dance convey information about distance and direction and that there is no clear switch between the two. We conclude that it is most meaningful to view the round and waggle dances as the ends of a continuum and that honeybees have just one adjustable recruitment signal: the waggle dance.

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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