Recruitment, Search Behavior, and Flight Ranges of Honey Bees

Abstract

During the past three decades, considerable evidence has been gathered in attempts to understand more fully honey bee recruitment to food sources. Those efforts also apply directly to two long-standing and competing recruitment hypotheses: odor search vs . “dance language” communication. However, whereas most researchers have focused on individual interactions and behavior, the colony can also be viewed as a unit. A review of evidence from a colony perspective reveals that colony members range an average distance from their home base, whether while foraging on food sources, while collecting water, or while relocating as swarms. Those averages, based on the logarithm of the distance from the colony, vary with the type of resource exploited and size of the odor field. Such a mathematical correspondence between distances travelled from parent colonies may well agree with an odorsearch recruitment model, but is hardly reconcilable with the “dance language” hypothesis.