Abstract
The honeybee (Apis mellifera) dance communication system is a marvel of collective behaviour, but the added value it brings to colony foraging efficiency is poorly understood. In temperate environments, preventing communication of foraging locations rarely decreases colony food intake, potentially because simultaneous transmission of olfactory information also plays a major role in foraging. Here, we employ social network analyses that quantify information flow across multiple temporally varying networks (each representing a different interaction type) to evaluate the relative contributions of dance communication and hive-based olfactory information transfer to honeybee recruitment events. We show that virtually all successful recruits to novel locations rely upon dance information rather than olfactory cues that could otherwise guide them to the same resource. Conversely, during reactivation to known sites, dances are relatively less important, as foragers are primarily guided by olfactory information. By disentangling the contributions of multiple information networks, the contexts in which dance communication truly matters amid a complex system full of redundancy can now be identified.
Highlights
The honeybee (Apis mellifera) dance communication system is a marvel of collective behaviour, but the added value it brings to colony foraging efficiency is poorly understood
Since dance communication is integral to nest-site selection in honeybees[19,20], these findings have led to the suggestion that the role of dancing in foraging could be a secondary one that is less critical than commonly supposed[21]
We estimate the power of each network to predict the order of arrival at the feeders, and find that in a context mimicking natural depletion of one patch of a flower species followed by discovery of another, waggle dance communication is the dominant mode of transmission
Summary
The honeybee (Apis mellifera) dance communication system is a marvel of collective behaviour, but the added value it brings to colony foraging efficiency is poorly understood. Establishing whether foraging bees are responding to dance information, to alternative recruitment mechanisms, or to a combination of these, is challenging given that all information sources are typically available simultaneously within the hive To overcome this difficulty, we use network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA)[22,23] to tease apart the relative importance of dance-based communication networks, in relation to individual search and olfactory information transfer, in guiding honeybees to both novel and known foraging sites. Its core assumption is that if a learnt behaviour or piece of information—such as discovery of a novel foraging site—spreads via social transmission, its diffusion will follow a social network[30] We extend this approach to allow for the simultaneous inclusion of multiple, time-varying social networks in order to identify the key information pathways amongst honeybee foragers. By revealing how alternative information pathways combine to shape behaviour, NBDA offers a promising approach for identifying the contexts in which dance communication matters most in driving honeybees to food
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