Honeybee recruitment to scented food sources: correlations between in-hive social interactions and foraging decision making.

MARÍA SOL BALBUENA; JULIETA MOLINAS; WALTER M FARINA

BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY AND SOCIOBIOLOGY

SPRINGER

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2012 p. 445 - 452

0340-5443

Information exchange of environmental cuesfacilitates decision-making processes among members ofinsect societies. In honeybee foraging, it is unknown howthe odor cues of a resource are relayed to inactive nestmates to enable resource exploitation at specific scentedsources. It is presumed that bees need to follow the danceor to be involved in trophallaxis with a successful forager toobtain the discovered floral scent. With this in mind, weevaluated the influence of food scent relayed through inhiveinteractions and the subsequent food choices. Resultsobtained from five colonies demonstrated that bees arrivingat a feeding area preferred to land at a feeder carrying theodor currently exploited by the trained forager. The beesthat landed at this feeder also showed more in-hiveencounters with the trained forager than the individualsthat landed at the alternative scented feeder. The mostfrequent interactions before landing at the correct feederwere body contacts with the active forager, a behavior thatinvolves neither dance following nor trophallaxis. Inaddition, a reasonable proportion of successful newcomersshowed no conspicuous interactions with the active forager.Results suggest that different sources of information can beintegrated inside the hive to establish an odor-rewardedassociation useful to direct honeybees to a feeding site. Forexample, simple contacts with foragers or food exchangeswith non-active foragers seem to be enough to choose afeeding site that carries the same scent collected by thefocal forager.