Dancing bees improve colony foraging success as long-term benefits outweigh short-term costs.

ABSTRACT: Waggle dancing bees provide nestmates with spatial information about high quality resources. Surprisingly, attempts to quantify the benefits of this encoded spatial information have failed to find positive effects on colony foraging success under many ecological circumstances. Experimental designs have often involved measuring the foraging success of colonies that were repeatedly switched between oriented dances versus disoriented dances (i.e. communicating vectors versus not communicating vectors). However, if recruited bees continue to visit profitable food sources for more than one day, this procedure would lead to confounded results because of the long-term effects of successful recruitment events. Using agent-based simulations, we found that spatial information was beneficial in almos

SUBMITTER: Schurch R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4139316 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature