Training for Defense? From Stochastic Traits to Synchrony in Giant Honey Bees (Apis dorsata).

ABSTRACT: In Giant Honey Bees, abdomen flipping happens in a variety of contexts. It can be either synchronous or cascaded, such as in the collective defense traits of shimmering and rearing-up, or it can happen as single-agent behavior. Abdomen flipping is also involved in flickering behavior, which occurs regularly under quiescent colony state displaying singular or collective traits, with stochastic, and (semi-) synchronized properties. It presumably acts via visual, mechanoceptive, and pheromonal pathways and its goals are still unknown. This study questions whether flickering is preliminary to shimmering which is subject of the fs (flickering-shimmering)-transition hypothesis? We tested the respective prediction that trigger sites (ts) at the nest surface (where shimmering waves had been genera

SUBMITTER: Weihmann F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4553592 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature