Honeybee recruitment to scented food sources: correlations between in-hive social interactions and foraging decisions |
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Authors: | M?S?Balbuena J?Molinas Email author" target="_blank">W?M?FarinaEmail author |
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Institution: | 1.Grupo de Estudio de Insectos Sociales, Departamento de Biodiversidad y Biología Experimental, IFIBYNE-CONICET, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales,Universidad de Buenos Aires,Buenos Aires,Argentina;2.Laboratorio de Neurobiología de la Memoria, Departamento de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Celular, IFIBYNE-CONICET, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales,Universidad de Buenos Aires,Buenos Aires,Argentina |
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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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