Trophallaxis in the honeybees, Apis mellifera (L.) as related to the past experience at the food source.

WAINSELBOIM, ALEJANDRO; FARINA WALTER M.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR

ACADEMIC PRESS LTD-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2003 vol. 66 p. 791 - 795

0003-3472

Forager honeybees returning to the hive after a successful foraging trip unload the collected liquid to recipient hivemates through mouth-to-mouth food exchange contacts (trophallaxis). The speed at which the liquid is transferred (unloading rate) from donor to recipient is related to the profitability offered by the recently visited food source. However, because a forager?s evaluation of the profitability of a food source, as measured by dancing behaviour, is influenced by previous foraging experience, we investigated whether trophallaxis might also be influenced by previous foraging experience. We measured unloading rate for a given profitability condition at the food source (in terms of solution flow rate) in three groups of foragers that differed in their previous experience at the source. One group experienced the same flow rate of solution in five successive visits (control group), another group experienced a lower flow rate in the first four visits and the third group experienced a higher flow rate in the first four visits. The results of the present study show that animals trained to a lower flow rate increased their unloading rate compared with the control group, indicating an influence of past foraging experience on their evaluation of food source profitability. This influence was not observed in the group trained to a higher flow rate, which responded as the control group. Additional experiments indicated that foragers appear to evaluate the profitability of the source by integrating an overall flow rate throughout the entire visit, instead of measuring only the current flow rate delivered by the feeder.