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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on December 6, 2007
Behavioral Ecology 2008 19(2):255-261; doi:10.1093/beheco/arm117
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Foraging in honeybees—when does it pay to dance?

Madeleine Beekmana,b and Jie Bin Lewa

a Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Lab, School of Biological Sciences A12 b Centre for Mathematical Biology, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

Address correspondence to M. Beekman. E-mail: mbeekman{at}bio.usyd.edu.au.


  Abstract

Honeybees are unique in that they are the only social insects that are known to recruit nest mates using the waggle dance. This waggle dance is used by successful foragers to convey information about both the direction and distance to food sources. Nest mates can use this spatial information, increasing their chances of locating the food source. But how effective is the bees' dance communication? Previous work has shown that dancing does not benefit a honeybee colony under all foraging conditions and that the benefits of dancing are small. We used an individual-based simulation model to investigate under which foraging conditions it pays to dance. We compared the net nectar intake of 3 types of colonies: 1) colonies that use dance communication; 2) colonies that did dance but could not use the dance's spatial information; and 3) colonies that did not dance. Our results show that dancing is beneficial when the probability of independent discovery of food sources is low. Low independent discovery rates occur when patches are very small or very far away. Under these conditions, dancing is beneficial as only a single individual needs to find a patch for the whole colony to benefit. The main benefit of the honeybee's dance communication, however, seems to be that it enables the colony to forage at the most profitable patches only, ignoring forage patches that are of low quality. Thus, dancing allows the colony to rapidly exploit high-quality patches, thereby preventing both intra- and interspecific competitors from using that same patch.

Key words: Apis, central-place foraging, communication, recruitment, scouting, waggle dance.

Received 6 May 2007; revised 16 October 2007; accepted 18 October 2007.


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