Abstract
Information exchange of environmental cues facilitates decision-making processes among members of insect societies. In honeybee foraging, it is unknown how the odor cues of a resource are relayed to inactive nest mates to enable resource exploitation at specific scented sources. It is presumed that bees need to follow the dance or to be involved in trophallaxis with a successful forager to obtain the discovered floral scent. With this in mind, we evaluated the influence of food scent relayed through in-hive interactions and the subsequent food choices. Results obtained from five colonies demonstrated that bees arriving at a feeding area preferred to land at a feeder carrying the odor currently exploited by the trained forager. The bees that landed at this feeder also showed more in-hive encounters with the trained forager than the individuals that landed at the alternative scented feeder. The most frequent interactions before landing at the correct feeder were body contacts with the active forager, a behavior that involves neither dance following nor trophallaxis. In addition, a reasonable proportion of successful newcomers showed no conspicuous interactions with the active forager. Results suggest that different sources of information can be integrated inside the hive to establish an odor-rewarded association useful to direct honeybees to a feeding site. For example, simple contacts with foragers or food exchanges with non-active foragers seem to be enough to choose a feeding site that carries the same scent collected by the focal forager.
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Acknowledgments
We are indebted to Christoph Grüter for helping us with the statistical analysis. We are also grateful to Roxana Josens, Andrés Arenas, and Lucila Herbert for valuable comments of the early version of this manuscript. We are also indebted to the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions on an early version of this manuscript.
Funding
This study was partly supported by grants from ANPCYT (PICT 2010 0425), University of Buenos Aires, CONICET (PIP 112-200801-00150), and Guggenheim fellowship to WMF. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Ethical standards
The experiments comply with the “Principles of animal care,” publication no. 86–23, revised 1985 of the National Institute of Health, and also with the current laws of the country in which the experiments were performed. The experiments comply with the current laws of the country in which they were performed.
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Communicated by R. Moritz
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Balbuena, M.S., Molinas, J. & Farina, W.M. Honeybee recruitment to scented food sources: correlations between in-hive social interactions and foraging decisions. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 66, 445–452 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-011-1290-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-011-1290-3