INVESTIGADORES
FARINA Walter Marcelo
artículos
Título:
Floral scents affect the distribution of hive bees around dancers
Autor/es:
DÍAZ, PAULA; GRÜTER, CHRISTOPH; FARINA, WALTER M
Revista:
BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY AND SOCIOBIOLOGY
Editorial:
Springer
Referencias:
Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2007 p. 1589 - 1597
ISSN:
0340-5443
Resumen:
Floral scents are important information cues used
to organize foraging-related tasks in honeybees. The waggle
dance, apart from encoding spatial information about food
sources, might facilitate the transfer of olfactory information
by increasing the dissipation of volatiles brought back by
successful foragers. By assuming that food scents are more
intensive on specific body parts of returning foragers, i.e., the
posterior legs of pollen foragers and mouthparts of nectar
foragers, we quantified the interactions between hive mates
and foragers during dances advertising different types of
food sources. For natural sources, a higher proportion of hive
mates contacted the hind legs of pollen dancers (where the
pollen loads were located) with their heads compared to nonpollen
dancers. On the other hand, the proportion of head-tohead
contacts was higher for non-pollen foragers during the
waggle runs. When the food scent was manipulated, dancers
collecting scented sugar solution had a higher proportion of
head-to-head contacts and a lower proportion around their
hind legs compared to dancers collecting unscented solution.
The presence of food odors did not affect in-hive behaviors
of dancers, but it increased the number of trophallaxes inbetween
waggle runs (i.e., during circle phases). These
results suggest that the honeybee dance facilitates the
olfactory information transfer between incoming foragers
and hive mates, and we propose that excitatory displays in
other social insect species serve the same purpose. While
recent empirical and theoretical findings suggested that the
colony level foraging benefits of the spatial information
encoded in the waggle dance vary seasonally and with
habitats, the role of the dance as a compound signal not only
indicating the presence of a profitable resource but also
amplifying the information transfer regarding floral odors
may be important under any ecological circumstances