UC Riverside

Many of the activities within honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies rely on the use of communication signals for organization. A classic example of this is in foraging, which is regulated through the use of the waggle dance, a positive feedback signal that recruits other foragers to the advertised food source, the tremble dance, which recruits bees to unload food from incoming foragers, and the stop signal, a negative feedback that acts as a counter to the waggle dance. During the waggle dance, observers touch the dancer with their antennae and follow her through one or more iteration of the dance. Though the results of previous research stated that the followers must be located to the rear of the dancer to receive the information encoded in the dance, I found that bees following from any location relative to the dancer succeeded in locating the advertised food source. In an experiment where half of the bees visiting a feeding station experienced a simulated attack via a pinch with forceps, the pinched bees produced more stop signals and danced fewer waggle dances than bees that had not been pinched. Most of the stop signals observed, however, came from bees that had not visited the feeding station at all. These may have been unloader bees attempting to decrease foraging due to an unmanageable influx of food from the feeding station or foragers that had visited other food sources and were not being unloaded promptly. When the amount of storage space available for food in a colony was manipulated between ample storage space and no storage space, significantly more stop signals and tremble dances were observed when there was no available storage space. This suggests the bees had assessed the lack of storage space and were attempting to decrease their colony’s foraging efforts.