Dance communication affects consistency, but not breadth, of resource use in pollen-foraging honey bees.

ABSTRACT: In groups of cooperatively foraging individuals, communication may improve the group's performance by directing foraging effort to where it is most useful. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) use a specialized dance to communicate the location of floral resources. Because honey bees dance longer for more rewarding resources, communication may shift the colony's foraging effort towards higher quality resources, and thus narrow the spectrum of resource types used. To test the hypothesis that dance communication changes how much honey bee colonies specialize on particular resources, we manipulated their ability to communicate location, and assessed the relative abundance of different pollen taxa they collected. This was repeated across five natural habitats that differed in floral species richness an

SUBMITTER: Donaldson-Matasci M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4182680 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature