Abstract
Scent marking food resources is expected to enhance foraging efficiency reducing search time. Many social bees exhibit this behavior, but scent-marking is absent in social wasps, except forVespa mandarinia. We tested for scent marking in the swarm-founding wasp,Polybia occidentalis. This wasp has moderately large colonies and utilizes resources that are concentrated in time and space, making scent marking profitable. Also, this wasp uses chemical markings to lead nestmates to a new nest site during swarm emigration, making it possible that it could use the same behavior to recruit nestmates to a food source. Foragers from 11 colonies were given a choice between a previously visited feeder and an unvisited one, both containing a rich, unscented sucrose solution. There was no difference in the number of visits to the two treatments. However, some individuals chose the feeder on one side more often. We conclude that foragers of this species of wasp do not use odor marks left behind by nestmates to find food, but they do exhibit the tendency, when returning to a food source that has not been depleted, to choose a resource based on its relative position, presumably by using visual cues.
Highlights
Recruitment is communication that brings nestmates to an area where work is required, and in social insects it enhances the efficiency of colony resource acquisition by increasing the number of foragers exploiting a food source [1]
In contrast to the bees and ants, no recruitment signals that encode distance or direction have been found in the social wasps [7, 8], but foragers in some species utilize social cues
We found no evidence that attractive scent marks were actively applied to the food dishes, and we conclude that scent marking does not occur in the context of carbohydrate foraging in P. occidentalis
Summary
Recruitment is communication that brings nestmates to an area where work is required, and in social insects it enhances the efficiency of colony resource acquisition by increasing the number of foragers exploiting a food source [1]. A number of recruitment mechanisms have evolved, including the well-known waggle dance of honey bees [2] and the trail pheromones of ants [3] and stingless bees [4, 5]. Both the occurrence and sophistication of recruitment mechanisms tend to correlate positively with colony size [6]. Olfactory cues from the food brought back by successful foragers can stimulate foraging and bias a colony’s collection efforts to resources with the same scent in the field. This behavior has been demonstrated in yellowjackets [9,10,11,12]
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