CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The best-studied communication behaviour in honeybees is the waggle dance, which encodes spatial information about food sources and is tuned with the resource profitability. It has been suggested that floral scents are important for recruitment of forager mates to the productive sources. In this sense, a context that might facilitate scent transmission might be one in which returning foragers can often interact with hive mates with low thresholds for food gathering. The scents of the recently discovered food source can be impregnated onto the dancers body and in its mouthparts, and it has been proposed that it is possible to acquire information about the floral odours by following dances. The aim of this study was: i) to quantify the interactions between dancers and followers according to the presence or absence of scents, and ii) to test the olfactory memory of recruits in the laboratory using the proboscis extension response (PER) paradigm. By manipulating the presence of scent in the sugar solution collected, we analyzed the behavior of dancers, followers and recruits. The results show that: i) a significantly higher proportion of contacts was observed over the heads of dancers that collected scented solution compared to dancers collecting unscented solution; ii) the presence of solution odour did not affect in-hive behaviours of dancers; iii) foragers collected scented solution performed more trophallaxes during the dancing period than when they were not dancing; iv) recruits learned the nectar odours brought back by foragers inside the hive by associative learning and retrieved this memory in the PER paradigm. Results suggested that: i) honeybee dances can be also seen as a mechanism that facilitates olfactory information transfer; and ii) this cue can be learned in the dancing context by hive mates that later will be recruited to the advertised flower type.