Abstract
Vibratory signals play a major role in the organization of honeybee colonies. Due to the seemingly chaotic nature of the mechano-acoustic landscape within the hive, it is difficult to understand the exact meaning of specific substrate-borne signals. Artificially generated vibrational substrate stimuli not only allow precise frequency and amplitude control for studying the effects of specific stimuli, but could also provide an interface for human-animal interaction for bee-keeping-relevant colony interventions. We present a simple method for analyzing motion activity of honeybees and show that specifically generated vibrational signals can be used to alter honeybee behavior. Certain frequency-amplitude combinations can induce a significant decrease and other signals might trigger an increase in honeybees’ motion activity. Our results demonstrate how different subtle local modulatory signals on the comb can influence individual bees in the local vicinity of the emitter. Our findings could fundamentally impact our general understanding of a major communication pathway in honeybee colonies. This pathway is based on mechanic signal emission and mechanic proprio-reception of honeybees in the bee colony. It is a candidate to be a technologically accessible gateway into the self-regulated system of the colony and thus may offer a novel information transmission interface between humans and honeybees for the next generation of “smart beehives” in future beekeeping.
Highlights
Honeybees are economically valuable as producers of honey and wax, but most importantly they are highly efficient pollinators of wild flowers and they provide exceptionally important ecosystem services [1, 2]
All data groups were compared pairwise (Figure 2A). This allowed us to classify the data into three distinct frequency-defined sections that share a common behavior: When bees were stimulated with frequencies located in section A, the observed bees in the region of interest (ROI) did not show a significantly reduced motion activity in the normalized pixel-based motion index (PMI), but even a slight increase in activity at low frequencies, with a maximum at 100 Hz
One common approach of such studies has been to playback vibration signals onto the combs [31, 32]. These signals consist of a convolution of many frequencies, they are often modulated, and can be very complexly structured. Another approach has been to study the effects of pure-tone sinusoidal frequencies, such was the study that first reported on the freezing response of honeybees to these stimuli [12]
Summary
Honeybees are economically valuable as producers of honey and wax, but most importantly they are highly efficient pollinators of wild flowers and they provide exceptionally important ecosystem services [1, 2]. The economic dependency on honeybees for crop production is significant: While the demand for bee-pollinated crops is constantly on the rise, the recently reported steep increases in colony losses have raised concerns about the sustainability of honeybee populations and crop production [3]. The Western honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) has evolved a sophisticated communication system based on a set of very distinct locomotion behaviors, called “dances,” which involve the production and a localized emission of specific mechano-acoustic vibrational patterns. These specific dance types trigger very specific reactions or behavioral modulations in those animals that perceive the emitted stimuli. A dancing bee communicates the location of a food source by a repeated figure-eight shaped movement. The direction of the linear waggle phase relative to gravity represents the direction of the food source
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