Social learning and waggle dance behavior used as tools to guide honey bees to a specific crop

, FARINA WM; DÍAZ, PAULA; ARENAS, ANDRÉS

Copenhagen

Congreso; IUSSI 2010 Congress; 2010

IUSSI

Floral odors experienced by honey bees inside their colonies can be conditioned through social interactions or via the food stores. It is known that associative memories shaped within the hive can affect preferences of foragers even several days after acquisition. These olfactory memories can be also retrieved when inactive foragers perceive the known scent carried by dancers. Our hypothesis is that memory retrieval within this informational context improves the decoding of the spatial information contained in the waggle dance and thus would promote a faster recruitment to these floral types. Beekeepers use to condition honey bee colonies by feeding them with syrups containing crushed flowers of the species that want to be pollinated. We developed a synthetic complex of a few volatile compounds that laboratory bees cannot discriminate from the natural fragrance of the sunflower, Helianthus annuus. Then, foraging behaviors of colonies with different treatments [sugar solution within the hive containing either (i) the synthetic-sunflower complex, (ii) the synthetic-jasmine complex; or (iii) the unscented solution] were compared by decoding waggle dances of their foragers. The observation hives were placed 600m SE from a sunflower field. Dance maps showed that the colony treated with the synthetic-sunflower complex presented lower delays to find the sunflower field, while its number of waggle dances indicating the right location increased exponentially during the first experimental day. The jasmine-treated hive showed longer delays and the number of right dances increased linearly. Even a lower rate of these behavioral measurements has been observed for the control hive. Results suggest that specific in-hive associative memories not only improve the acquisition of the location information transmitted but also open the possibility to manage honey bee colonies to specific field crops in a simple way.