Honeybees consider flower danger in their waggle dance
Section snippets
Methods
The experiment was conducted in the summer of 2008 at the Wildlife Research Station in Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada (see Dukas 2008 for description of field site and basic set-up). We trained honeybees from a two-frame observation hive, with approximately 2000 workers, to forage on two artificial flowers that were approximately 250 m from the colony and 60 m apart. Flowers consisted of jars of scented sucrose solution inverted over grooved Plexiglas plates (von Frisch 1967). To aid in
Results
On average, bees returning from safe flowers performed about 20 times more waggle runs than bees returning from dangerous flowers (two-tailed Mann–Whitney U test: U = 46.5, Nsafe = 18, Ndangerous = 14, P = 0.001; Fig. 1). We also conducted a matched comparison using trials as the independent experimental units. This analysis indicated that approximately 30 times more waggle runs were performed by bees visiting the safe flower than the dangerous flower (two-tailed Wilcoxon signed-ranks test: T = 0, N = 8, P =
Discussion
Our results demonstrate that the presence of a cue of predation risk depresses the dance behaviour of honeybees. Previous studies have shown that the waggle dance is modulated by the reward properties of flowers (von Frisch, 1967, Waddington, 1982, Seeley, 1994, Seeley et al., 2000, Afik et al., 2008, Seefeldt and De Marco, 2008). Our study indicates that predation risk, a property unrelated to the quality, quantity, accessibility, or distribution of reward, also affects honeybees' dance
Acknowledgments
We thank Les Simonffy for providing the bees, Lauren Dukas and Meinas Elmusharaf for dedicated assistance, Martin Daly, L. Dukas, Jeff Galef, Heather Poole and anonymous referees for comments on the manuscript, the staff of the Wildlife Research Station, Algonquin Park for help throughout the experiment, and Algonquin Provincial Park Service for permits to work in the park. This study was supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canada Foundation for Innovation
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