Abstract
Here we explore how waggle dance decoding may be applied as a tool for ecology by evaluating the benefits and limitations of the methodology compared to other existing ways to evaluate the honey bees’ use of the landscape. The honey bee foragers sample and “report” back on large areas (c. 100km2). Because honey bees perform dances only for the most profitable resources, these data provide spatial information about the availability of good quality forage for any given time. We argue that dance decoding provides information for a wide range of ecological, conservation, and land management issues. In this way, one species and methodology gives us a novel measure of a landscape’s profitability and “health” that may be widely relevant, not just for honey bees, but for other flower-visiting insects as well.
Highlights
Wilhem Nylander, a Finnish-born botanist, liked to stroll around Paris, finding perhaps that the more verdant parts of the city reminded him of his Helsinki origins
A decoder can decode a dance in under 5 min, but this estimate does not include the time spent watching a video to find a bee that is dancing. It may take a trained worker several hours to locate and decode 20 dances from 1 h of video of the dance floor area of an observation hive. It is worth considering a discussion on whether or not dance decoding is worth it? Perhaps decoding large numbers of dances, which would take the contributions of many people over many months, would not be worthwhile for basic biology alone
Dance decoding can be effectively combined with forage analysis in circumstances where the bee may be foraging upon a particular target crop that is growing in known locations to generate powerful individual and colony level information about food collection and pollination services (Garbuzov et al, 2015)
Summary
Wilhem Nylander, a Finnish-born botanist, liked to stroll around Paris, finding perhaps that the more verdant parts of the city reminded him of his Helsinki origins. A honey bee forager, in her decision to perform a waggle dance, integrates all relevant costs of flight distance, potential competition with other flower-visiting insects, and nectar and pollen availability, and if her assessment comes out in the positive, she performs a dance.
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