Honeybee recruitment to scented food sources: correlations between in-hive social interactions and foraging decision making.

MARÍA SOL BALBUENA; JULIETA MOLINAS; WALTER M FARINA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 42 th International Congress of Apiculture APIMONDIA 2011; 2011

The efficient foraging display by honeybee hives can be explained by a compromise between optimizing food-carrier activity at the field and exchanging resource information inside the nest. Communication within the hive includes the transfer of incidental cues about the discovered food such as floral odors, and the transmission of signals mainly through the waggle dance. Within this behavioral context, information exchange about food scent via mouth-to-mouth trophallaxis can facilitate the decisionmaking process while foraging bees searching for food. Nevertheless, until now is unknown if odor-rewarded memories formed during these social interactions affect food-choice behavior in the field. We asked how scented food transferred within the hive influence the type of social interactions occurred inside the hive and the food choices in the field. Our results show that recruits landed in a higher proportion in the feeder offered the same odor carried by the trained forager. Moreover, the new arrived bees had made a higher number of body contacts with the trained forager just before departure to the hive. From these results, we conclude that the memories formed during in-hive social interactions can strongly affect the decision-making process during foraging.