Honey bee waggle dance communication increases diversity of pollen diets in intensively managed agricultural landscapes.

Abstract

The benefits of honey bee dance communication for colony performance in different resource environments are still not well understood. Here, we test the hypothesis that directional dance communication enables honey bee colonies to maintain a diverse pollen diet, especially in landscapes with low resource diversity. To test this hypothesis, we placed 24 Apis mellifera L. colonies with either intact or experimentally disrupted dance communication in eight agricultural landscapes that differed in the diversity of flowering plants and in the dominance of mass-flowering crops. Pollen from incoming foragers was collected and identified via DNA metabarcoding. Disrupting dance communication affected the way the diversity of honey bee pollen diets was impacted by the dominance of mass-flowering crops in available flower resources (p=.04). With increasing dominance of mass-flowering crops in resource environments, foragers of colonies with intact communication foraged on an increasing proportion of available plant genera (p=.01). This was not the case for colonies with disrupted dance communication (p=.5). We conclude that the honey bee dance communication benefits pollen foraging on diverse plant resources and thereby contributes to high quality nutrition in environments with low-resource diversity.