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

WALTER M. FARINA, PAULA C. DÍAZ AND ANDRÉS ARENAS

Copenhagen Denmark

Congreso; International Union for the Study of Social Insects; 2010

Floral odors experienced by honey bees inside their colonies can be conditioned through social interactions (trophallaxis) 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 would improve the transmission of spatial information encoded in the waggle dance. This fact would promote a faster recruitment to these floral types. Beekeepers used to condition honey bee colonies by feeding them with syrups containing crushed flowers of the species that wanted to be pollinated. We developed a synthetic complex of a few volatile compounds that bees cannot discriminate from the natural fragrance of the sunflower, Helianthus annuus. Foraging behaviors of colonies with different treatments [i.e., in-hive feeders containing sugar solution either with (i) the synthetic-sunflower complex, (ii) the synthetic-jasmine complex; and (iii) unscented solution] were compared by decoding waggle dances of their foragers. The observation hives were placed 600m SE from a sunflower field. Dance maps of the three colonies show that the colony treated with the synthetic-sunflower complex presented lower delays to find the sunflower field. Moreover,  the presence of waggle dances indicating the right location increased exponentially during the first day of measurement. The jasmine-treated colony showed higher delays and the number of dances indicating this location increased linearly. A much lower rate of these measurements has been observed for the control colony. Then, present results suggest that specific in-hive associative memories not only improves the acquisition of the location information of particular crop but also opening the possibility to manage honey bee colonies to specific and commercial field crops.