The recruiter’s excitement – Thorax vibration features of the honey bee’s waggle dance related to food source profitability.

HRNCIR M; MAIA-SILVA C; MC CABE SI; FARINA WM

JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY

COMPANY OF BIOLOGISTS LTD

Año: 2011 p. 4055 - 4064

0022-0949

The honey beeʼs waggle dance constitutes a remarkable example of an efficient code allowing social exploitation of availablefeeding sites. In addition to indicating the position (distance, direction) of a food patch, both the occurrence and frequency of thedances depend on the profitability of the exploited resource (sugar concentration, solution flow rate). During the waggle dance,successful foragers generate pulsed thoracic vibrations that putatively serve as a source of different kinds of information for hivebees, who cannot visually decode dances in the darkness of the hive. In the present study, we asked whether these vibrations area reliable estimator of the excitement of the dancer when food profitability changes in terms of both sugar concentration andsolution flow rate. The probability of producing thoracic vibrations as well as several features related to their intensity during thewaggle phase (pulse duration, velocity amplitude, duty cycle) increased with both these profitability variables. The number ofvibratory pulses, however, was independent of sugar concentration and reward rate exploited. Thus, pulse number could indeedbe used by dance followers as reliable information about food source distance, as suggested in previous studies. The variabilityof the dancerʼs thoracic vibrations in relation to changes in food profitability suggests their role as an indicator of the recruiterʼsmotivational state. Hence, the vibrations could make an important contribution to forager reactivation and, consequently, to theorganisation of collective foraging processes in honey bees.