The response of the honeybee dance to uncertain rewards

Abstract

This work focuses on the responses of dancing bees to uncertain rewards. We varied the distribution of a fixed amount of sugar solution among the several flowers of a patch and recorded the foraging and subsequent dance behaviour of single honeybees collecting such a reward at that patch. Concurrently, we aimed to minimize the well-known modulatory effects of sugar reward on both the probability and the strength of a honeybee's dance. It was under these circumstances that we conceived the honeybee dance as an autonomous information-processing system and asked whether or not such a system is sensitive to uncertainty of reward. Our results suggest that bees can tune their dancing according to the distribution of sugar reward among the several flowers of a patch, and that they seemingly do this based on the number - or the frequency - of their non-rewarding inspections to these flowers: the higher the number of non-rewarding inspections the lower the probability of dancing. As a result, a honeybee's dance appears as 'risk-averse', meaning that dances for uncertain resources are less likely. Presumably, the ultimate result of having 'risk-averse' dances is a colony's ability to diminish delayed rewards and the effects of competition with other flower visitors for limited resources. We conclude that a systems approach to the honeybee dance will help to further analyse the regulation of a honeybee's threshold for dancing, and that theoretical accounts of 'risk-sensitive' dances would prove fruitful in broader studies of honeybee foraging, particularly if one were to examine how recruitment actually translates into fitness.