Foraging Honey Bees: How Foragers Determine and Transmit Information About Feeding Site Locations

Abstract

Experiments by Karl von Frisch in the 1940s revealed that dances of ­successful foragers in honeybee colonies describe the locations of feeding sites by timing and direction of patterns in their dances. v. Frisch and his students believed that energy expanded on the way to a feeder is used as a measure of distance (“The Energy Hypothesis”). More recent experiments showed that the optic flow is used to determine distance (“The Optic Flow Hypothesis”): Bees flying through a narrow tunnel, that generates a large amount of optic flow while moving forward, indicate a much larger distance than bees flying in the field. The dances of tunnel bees can be used to deceive hive mates to search at much larger distances when they leave their hives. “Robot Bee Experiments”, intended to reveal the nature of bee communication, did not lead to completely satisfying results: Robots are not as efficient as real dancers. Four chemical compounds, detected with gas chromatograph/mass spectrometry on the abdomen of dancers, might be used as “pheromones”. The following contribution does not discuss the efficiency of dances, which is covered in other chapters of this book, but it rather tries to explain the physiology of this remarkable behavior.