Honey bees use social information in waggle dances more fully when foraging errors are more costly

Abstract

Social animals can obtain valuable information from group members, but sometimes experience conflicts between this social information and personal information obtained through their own experience. Experienced honey bee foragers (Apis mellifera) have personal information about familiar food sources, and can also obtain social information by following waggle dances. However, it is unclear whether temporarily unemployed foragers whose visits to a food source have been interrupted make full use of social information from dancers or rely primarily on their own personal information to determine whether their familiar food source is active again. We hypothesized that experienced foragers should pay more attention to the social information in waggle dances when foraging errors that can arise from ignoring social information are more costly. We manipulated the cost of mistakenly flying to a familiar but unprofitable food source by training bees to visit feeders that were either close (100 m) or far (1000 m) from the hive and found that temporarily unemployed foragers who had been trained to forage at more distant feeders were more likely to pay attention to social information about food source location. Our findings demonstrate that experienced forager bees can flexibly alter the extent to which they rely on social, as opposed to personal, information and are more likely to fully utilize social information from dancers when foraging errors are more costly. Key words: Apis mellifera, communication, dance language, reactivation, social information, waggle dance. [Behav Ecol]