Dance Communication Affects Consistency, but Not Breadth, of Resource Use in Pollen-Foraging Honey Bees

Matina Donaldson-Matasci,Anna Dornhaus,Nigel E Raine

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107527

Matina Donaldson-Matasci, Anna Dornhaus + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0107527

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Oct 1, 2014
Citations: 50	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Harvey Mudd College, University of Arizona

Abstract

In groups of cooperatively foraging individuals, communication may improve the group’s performance by directing foraging effort to where it is most useful. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) use a specialized dance to communicate the location of floral resources. Because honey bees dance longer for more rewarding resources, communication may shift the colony’s foraging effort towards higher quality resources, and thus narrow the spectrum of resource types used. To test the hypothesis that dance communication changes how much honey bee colonies specialize on particular resources, we manipulated their ability to communicate location, and assessed the relative abundance of different pollen taxa they collected. This was repeated across five natural habitats that differed in floral species richness and spatial distribution. Contrary to expectation, impairing communication did not change the number or diversity of pollen (resource) types used by individual colonies per day. However, colonies with intact dance communication were more consistent in their resource use, while those with impaired communication were more likely to collect rare, novel pollen types. This suggests that communication plays an important role in shaping how much colonies invest in exploring new resources versus exploiting known ones. Furthermore, colonies that did more exploration also tended to collect less pollen overall, but only in environments with greater floral abundance per patch. In such environments, the ability to effectively exploit highly rewarding resources may be especially important–and dance communication may help colonies do just that. This could help explain how communication benefits honey bee colonies, and also why it does so only under certain environmental conditions.

Highlights

For animals living in social groups, collecting food is often a collaborative venture
We found that colonies with communication intact were significantly less likely to collect novel pollen types than those with communication impaired (LR test: x2 = 7.58, p = 0.006; see Figure 3b)
Communication might be useful in environments with many resource types that vary in quality [23,45,46]

Summary

Introduction

For animals living in social groups, collecting food is often a collaborative venture. Honey bee foragers fan out over the landscape from their hive, searching for flowers rich in pollen or nectar Those that are successful may choose to recruit more foragers to the same patch, using the famous ‘‘dance language’’ to communicate the flowers’ location [7]. Many ant species use pheromone trails to recruit helpers to rewarding food sources. In both of these cases, it is thought that communication about high-quality resources creates a feedback loop: each new forager recruited may in turn recruit more, until overexploitation reduces the rate at which rewards can be collected [8,9]. The results of this dynamic process have not been well quantified in nature, it is thought that for many trail-laying ants the result is a collective decision to exploit only the best resource, while honey bees are able to maintain some level of foraging effort even on lower-quality resources [12,13,14,15,16]

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