Communication by Vibrations and Scents in the Comb

Abstract

Communication on honeybee combs includes both distance and direction in the case of waggle dances. Potential recruits attending a dancer emit vibrations which elicit a response from the dancer to give the emitter a sample of nectar. Tooting and quacking by queens are both airborne sounds and substrate vibrations which are carried mainly by the fundamental frequency component. Bees recognize these signals mainly by their temporal structure and comparisons of the threshold, emission level, and attenuation with distance, which suggests that they are used only within a restricted area of the comb. When waggle-dancing honeybees move on comb, they produce vibratory movements that indicate the location of the waggle dancer and the pulsed vibrations are increased during waggle phases, so amplifying the signals for remote dance followers. Because sound intensity decreases with the density of the medium and with distance, beeswax is a medium for sound transmission. Pheromones in comb serve as slow-release systems with long time constants and include transmissions of colony odour, queenrightness, cell capping, colony odour, kin recognition, footprint pheromones, wax-salvaging behaviour etc. The specific dance sites that occur on combs are due to chemical tagging. Masking colony odour occurs when receiver bees are conditioned to the same comb source as introduced bees, which are accepted. A series of only a few methyl esters produced by queens and workers are sufficient to induce capping of mature brood; but capping worker brood may depend on the depth of larvae in comb cells and not just ratios of ester emissions. Nonetheless, these results are not mutually exclusive in principle.