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1.
Summary A honey bee colony can skillfully choose among nectar sources. It will selectively exploit the most profitable source in an array and will rapidly shift its foraging efforts following changes in the array. How does this colony-level ability emerge from the behavior of individual bees? The answer lies in understanding how bees modulate their colony's rates of recruitment and abandonment for nectar sources in accordance with the profitability of each source. A forager modulates its behavior in relation to nectar source profitability: as profitability increases, the tempo of foraging increases, the intensity of dancing increases, and the probability of abandoning the source decreases. How does a forager assess the profitability of its nectar source? Bees accomplish this without making comparisons among nectar sources. Neither do the foragers compare different nectar sources to determine the relative profitability of any one source, nor do the food storers compare different nectar loads and indicate the relative profitability of each load to the foragers. Instead, each forager knows only about its particular nectar source and independently calculates the absolute profitability of its source. Even though each of a colony's foragers operates with extremely limited information about the colony's food sources, together they will generate a coherent colonylevel response to different food sources in which better ones are heavily exploited and poorer ones are abandoned. This is shown by a computer simulation of nectar-source selection by a colony in which foragers behave as described above. Nectar-source selection by honey bee colonies is a process of natural selection among alternative nectar sources as foragers from more profitable sources survive (continue visiting their source) longer and reproduce (recruit other foragers) better than do foragers from less profitable sources. Hence this colonial decision-making is based on decentralized control. We suggest that honey bee colonies possess decentralized decision-making because it combines effectiveness with simplicity of communication and computation within a colony.
Offprint requests to: T.D. Seeley 相似文献
2.
Jacobus C. Biesmeijer Mark G. L. van Nieuwstadt Saskia Lukács Marinus J. Sommeijer 《Behavioral ecology and sociobiology》1998,42(2):107-116
Social insect foragers have to make foraging decisions based on information that may come from two different sources: information
learned and memorised through their own experience (“internal” information) and information communicated by nest mates or
directly obtained from their environment (“external” information). The role of these sources of information in decision-making
by foragers was studied observationally and experimentally in stingless bees of the genus Melipona. Once a Melipona forager had started its food-collecting career, its decisions to initiate, continue or stop its daily collecting activity
were mainly based upon previous experience (activity on previous days, the time at which foraging was initiated the day(s)
before, and, during the day, the success of the last foraging flights) and mediated through direct interaction with the food
source (load size harvested and time to collect a load). External information provided by returning foragers advanced the
start of foraging of experienced bees. Most inexperienced bees initiated their foraging day after successful foragers had
returned to the hive. The start of foraging by other inexperienced bees was stimulated by high waste-removal activity of nest
mates. By experimentally controlling the entries of foragers (hence external information input) it was shown that very low
levels of external information input had large effect on the departure of experienced foragers. After the return of a single
successful forager, or five foragers together, the rate of forager exits increased dramatically for 15 min. Only the first
and second entry events had large effect; later entries influenced forager exit patterns only slightly. The results show that
Melipona foragers make decisions based upon their own experience and that communication stimulates these foragers if it concerns the
previously visited source. We discuss the organisation of individual foraging in Melipona and Apis mellifera and are led to the conclusion that these species behave very similarly and that an information-integration model (derived
from Fig. 1) could be a starting point for future research on social insect foraging.
Received: 16 April 1997 / Accepted after revision: 30 August 1997 相似文献
3.
Potential mechanisms for the communication of height and distance by a stingless bee, Melipona panamica 总被引:1,自引:1,他引:0
This study investigates the recruitment communication mechanisms of a stingless bee, Melipona panamica, whose foragers can evidently communicate the three-dimensional location of a good food source. To determine if the bees
communicate location information inside or outside the nest, we conducted removal experiments by training marked foragers
to one of two identical feeders and then separating these experienced foragers from potential recruits as they left the nest.
The feeders were positioned to test the communication of each dimension. The results show that recruits do not simply follow
experienced foragers to the food source. Height and distance are communicated within the nest, while direction is communicated
outside the nest. We then examined the pulsed sounds produced by recruiting foragers. While unloading food, recruiting foragers
produced several short pulses and one or more very long pulses. On average, the longest unloading pulse per performance was
31–50% longer (P ≤ 0.018) for bees foraging on the forest floor than for bees foraging at the top of the forest canopy (40 m high). While
dancing, recruiting foragers produced sound pulses whose duration was positively correlated with the distance to the food
source (P < 0.001). Dancing recruiters also produced several short sound pulses followed by one or more long pulses. The longest dance
pulse per performance was 291 ± 194 ms for a feeder 25 m from the nest and 1858 ± 923 ms for a feeder 360 m away from the
nest. The mechanism of directional communication remains a mystery. However, the direction removal experiment demonstrates
that newcomers cannot use forager-deposited scent marks for long-distance orientation (>100 m from the nest).
Received: 25 September 1997 / Accepted after revision: 31 May 1998 相似文献
4.
Catherine L. Craig 《Behavioral ecology and sociobiology》1994,35(1):45-52
Although rewarded bees learn and remember colors and patterns, they have difficulty in learning to avoid negative stimuli such as decorated spider webs spun by Argiope argentata. A. argentata decorates its web with silk patterns that vary unpredictably (Fig. 1) and thus foraging insects that return to sites where spiders are found encounter new visual cues daily. Stingless bees can learn to avoid spider webs but avoidance-learning is slowed or inhibited by daily variation in web decorations (Figs. 3,4; Tables 1,2). In addition, even if bees learn to avoid decorated webs found in one location, they are unable to generalize learned-avoidance responses to similarly decorated webs found at other sites. A. argentata seems to have evolved a foraging behavior that is tied to the ways insects perceive and process information about their environment. Because of the evolutionary importance of bee-flower interdependence, the predatory behavior of web-decorating spiders may be difficult for natural selection to act against. 相似文献
5.
It is unclear whether stingless bees in the genus Melipona (Hymenoptera, Apidae, Meliponini) can reliably encode the distance to a food source through recruitment sounds produced inside the nest, in part because the sound features correlated with distance also vary with food quality. We therefore trained marked foragers of two species, Melipona mandacaia and M. bicolor, to feeders at different distances and to different sucrose concentrations at the same distance. In both species, foragers successfully recruited to a rich 2.5-m food source and produced pulsed recruitment sounds in which pulse duration was significantly and positively correlated with distance to the rich food source. When returning from poorer food sources (0.6–1.5 m), foragers of both species decreased sound production, producing shorter sound pulses and longer sound interpulses than they did for 2.5 m food located at the same distance. Thus the temporal structure of M. mandacaia and M. bicolor recruitment sounds varies with distance and food quality. However, nestmates were not recruited by performances for poorer food sources (0.6–1.5 m), whose sucrose concentration was sufficiently low to affect recruitment sounds. Surprisingly, the interphase (the time between behavioral phases that communicate location) also increases with decreasing food quality in the closely related honeybees (Apis), suggesting a potential homology in the effect of food quality on the recruitment systems of Apis and Melipona. We explore the evolutionary implications of these similarities.Communicated by M. Giurfa 相似文献
6.
Worker allocation in insect societies: coordination of nectar foragers and nectar receivers in honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies 总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1
Nectar collection in the honey-bee is partitioned. Foragers collect nectar and take it to the nest, where they transfer it
to receiver bees who then store it in cells. Because nectar is a fluctuating and unpredictable resource, changes in worker
allocation are required to balance the work capacities of foragers and receivers so that the resource is exploited efficiently.
Honey bee colonies use a complex system of signals and other feedback mechanisms to coordinate the relative and total work
capacities of the two groups of workers involved. We present a functional evaluation of each of the component mechanisms used
by honey bees – waggle dance, tremble dance, stop signal, shaking signal and abandonment – and analyse how their interplay
leads to group-level regulation. We contrast the actual regulatory system of the honey bee with theory. The tremble dance
conforms to predicted best use of information, where the group in excess applies negative feedback to itself and positive
feedback to the group in shortage, but this is not true of the waggle dance. Reasons for this and other discrepancies are
discussed. We also suggest reasons why honey bees use a combination of recruitment plus abandonment and not switching between
subtasks, which is another mechanism for balancing the work capacities of foragers and receivers. We propose that the waggle
and tremble dances are the primary regulation mechanisms, and that the stop and shaking signals are secondary mechanisms,
which fine-tune the system. Fine-tuning is needed because of the inherent unreliability of the cues, queueing delays, which
foragers use to make recruitment decisions.
Received: 15 December 1998 / Received in revised form: 6 March 1999 / Accepted: 12 March 1999 相似文献