@article {129506, title = {Diverse communication strategies in bees as a window into adaptations to an unpredictable world.}, journal = {Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A}, volume = {120}, year = {2023}, month = {2023 Jun 13}, pages = {e2219031120}, abstract = {

Communication is a fundamental feature of animal societies and helps their members to solve the challenges they encounter, from exploiting food sources to fighting enemies or finding a new home. Eusocial bees inhabit a wide range of environments and they have evolved a multitude of communication signals that help them exploit resources in their environment efficiently. We highlight recent advances in our understanding of bee communication strategies and discuss how variation in social biology, such as colony size or nesting habits, and ecological conditions are important drivers of variation in communication strategies. Anthropogenic factors, such as habitat conversion, climate change, or the use of agrochemicals, are changing the world bees inhabit, and it is becoming clear that this affects communication both directly and indirectly, for example by affecting food source availability, social interactions among nestmates, and cognitive functions. Whether and how bees adapt their foraging and communication strategies to these changes represents a new frontier in bee behavioral and conservation research.

}, keywords = {Acclimatization, Animals, Bees, Communication, Ecosystem}, issn = {1091-6490}, doi = {10.1073/pnas.2219031120}, author = {Alves, Denise A and George, Ebi A and Kaur, Rajbir and Brockmann, Axel and Hrncir, Michael and Gr{\"u}ter, Christoph} } @article {74446, title = {Adaptive evolution of honeybee dance dialects.}, journal = {Proc Biol Sci}, volume = {287}, year = {2020}, month = {2020 Mar 11}, pages = {20200190}, abstract = {

Efficient communication is highly important for the evolutionary success of social animals. Honeybees (genus ) are unique in that they communicate the spatial information of resources using a symbolic {\textquoteright}language{\textquoteright}, the waggle dance. Different honeybee species differ in foraging ecology but it remains unknown whether this shaped variation in the dance. We studied distance dialects-interspecific differences in how waggle duration relates to flight distance-and tested the hypothesis that these evolved to maximize communication precision over the bees{\textquoteright} foraging ranges. We performed feeder experiments with , and in India and found that had the steepest dialect, i.e. a rapid increase in waggle duration with increasing feeder distance, had an intermediate, and had the lowest dialect. By decoding dances for natural food sites, we inferred that the foraging range was smallest in , intermediate in and largest in . The inverse correlation between foraging range and dialect was corroborated when comparing six (sub)species across the geographical range of the genus including previously published data. We conclude that dance dialects constitute adaptations resulting from a trade-off between the spatial range and the spatial accuracy of communication.

}, issn = {1471-2954}, doi = {10.1098/rspb.2020.0190}, author = {Kohl, Patrick L and Thulasi, Neethu and Rutschmann, Benjamin and George, Ebi A and Steffan-Dewenter, Ingolf and Brockmann, Axel} } @article {59721, title = {Honey bees flexibly use two navigational memories when updating dance distance information.}, journal = {J Exp Biol}, volume = {222}, year = {2019}, month = {2019 Jun 13}, abstract = {

Honey bees can communicate navigational information which makes them unique amongst all prominent insect navigators. Returning foragers recruit nest mates to a food source by communicating flight distance and direction using a small scale walking pattern: the waggle dance. It is still unclear how bees transpose flight information to generate corresponding dance information. In single feeder shift experiments, we monitored for the first time how individual bees update dance duration after a shift of feeder distance. Interestingly, the majority of bees (86\%) needed two or more foraging trips to update dance duration. This finding demonstrates that transposing flight navigation information to dance information is not a reflexive behavior. Furthermore, many bees showed intermediate dance durations during the update process, indicating that honey bees highly likely use two memories: (i) a recently acquired navigation experience and (ii) a previously stored flight experience. Double-shift experiments, in which the feeder was moved forward and backward, created an experimental condition in which honey bee foragers did not update dance duration; suggesting the involvement of more complex memory processes. Our behavioral paradigm allows the dissociation of foraging and dance activity and opens the possibility of studying the molecular and neural processes underlying the waggle dance behavior.

}, issn = {1477-9145}, doi = {10.1242/jeb.195099}, author = {Chatterjee, Arumoy and George, Ebi A and M V, Prabhudev and Basu, Pallab and Brockmann, Axel} }