Study finds that diverse communication styles help more foragers reach their food source.
As far as animals go, honeybees are world-class dancers.
While not as deep and complex as a Super Bowl half-time show, the bees’ moves, known as the “waggle” dance, convey specific food foraging instructions to their nestmates. The direction the dancer moves explains to other bees which way to go, and the duration of the waggle dance, or the “run,” shows how far to go.
Once other bees have been convinced to follow the directions, they are “recruited.” After receiving the instructions, these recruits leave the hive to find the food their sisters were so excited about.
Unfortunately, many of these recruited bees do not always find the food they seek. Margaret Couvillon, associate professor in the Department of Entomology, and her former Ph.D. student Laura McHenry set out to find out why.
“Although the waggle dance itself is fascinating, my lab has additionally been intrigued about waggle dance miscommunication, or the hows and whys behind the failure of the dance recruitment,” Couvillon said.
To investigate, the team designed an experiment using clear-walled observation hives, video tracking, and individually tagged bees. Foragers were trained to visit an artificial food source, then observed as they performed waggle dances for their nestmates. Recruited bees were tracked to see whether they found the food and which dancer had given the instructions.
The researchers expected that bees with similar communication styles would be more successful in recruiting others — but the results told a different story.
Bees that danced with slightly longer runs, which led recruits to overshoot the food location, turned out to be the most successful recruiters. The researchers theorized that this overshooting gave the bees a second chance to encounter the food source on the return flight to the hive, boosting their odds of success.
This finding adds to growing evidence that diversity within a colony improves performance. Individual waggle dances are not one-size-fits-all — and that variation benefits the hive.
“We’ve known for a while that behavioral and genetic diversity benefit honeybees, allowing for superior thermoregulation, disease resistance, growth, and foraging,” said Couvillon. “Now we have also seen that diverse communication enhances recruitment success.”
The research was published in the journal Current Biology and supported by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, and the Department of Entomology.