Use of high-speed video recording to detect wing beating produced by honey bees

Abstract

Honey bees use many signals to communicate and coordinate different activities in a colony. In this study, wing and abdomen movements occurring during social interactions between bees were recorded using a high-speed camera. Wing beating was observed in queens, workers and drones. Some of the observed behaviors were reported earlier, but many of them were described here for the first time including drones moving their wings while leaving the nest for mating flights, workers trying to evict them from the nest or in a colony with drone-laying queen, and workers vibrating their wings in contact with a queen outside of the process of swarming, in turns with a shaking signal or while evicting drones from the nest. Queens moved their wings with significantly higher frequency, performing longer pulses of wing beats than drones and workers. Drones vibrated their wings with the frequency similar to workers, but they performed significantly shorter pulses of wing beating. In workers, the frequency of wing beats and the duration of wing-beating pulses were significantly different among various behaviors. Wing beating was performed by bees relatively often in many social contexts and it differed in frequency and pulse duration, which indicates that wing beating may be used for transferring information. High-speed video recording revealed a wide range of new behaviors which may play an important role in honey bee communication. Therefore, it may be used as an alternative or addition to recordings made with microphones and laser vibrometers.