The food recruitment dance of the stingless bee, Melipona panamica

Abstract

Foragers of the stingless bee Meliponapanamica can communicate the location of a good food source to nestmates and evidently communicate part of this information inside the nest. However there is no careful description of within-nest recruitment behavior for this species or for any other stingless bee. Therefore the goal of this paper is to provide a detailed description of the behaviors of recruiting M. panamica foragers within the nest. A recruiting forager enters the nest, begins producing pulsed sounds as food-unloading bees collect her food (unloading phase), and then performs a dance by rapidly executing clockwise and counterclockwise turns while continuing to produce sound pulses (dance phase). To investigate whether directional information is encoded in the dance, I alternately recorded the behavior of foragers trained to two food sources, each 175 m from the colony but in opposite directions (north and south). I examined the following parameters and found no differences between the dances of foragers feeding in opposite directions: (1) order of clockwise and counterclockwise turns, (2) turn direction, (3) angular start position, (4) angular stop position, (5) turn magnitude, and (6) turn angular velocity. Foragers recruiting for a rich food source (2.5 M) initially unloaded food with their bodies oriented 180° from the entrance. They began turns at random orientations, but tended to end these turns facing the nest entrance (0°). Dancers for poor food sources (1.0 M sucrose solution) turned at significantly lower velocities than dancers for good food sources (2.5 M sucrose solution), and exhibited random initial, start-turn, and stop-turn orientations. Throughout her stay inside the nest, the recruiting forager produced sounds. During sound production, her folded wings vibrated dorsoventrally over her abdomen and she attracted the attention of follower bees who positioned their antennae closely around her body. Foragers recruiting for 1.0 M and 2.5 M food sources attracted the same number of food-unloading bees, but 1.0 M recruiters attracted significantly fewer followers around their abdomens.