Scripps Coastal Reserve

04 Apr, 01 PM - 15 Apr, 01 PM

Background: It is unclear how honey bees move spatially within a foraging patch while measuring distances that will be used for navigation and communication. These strategies will influence the important pollination service that honey bee colonies provide. As a honey bee sets out to find a high quality food source, she starts measuring how far she is flying so she can find her way back. Upon return, she performs the waggle dance for her nestmates, and they also learn how far the rich source is. Bees measure distance using angular velocity, which depends on the distance between the bee and surrounding objects, like nearby flowers, or faraway trees and mountains. Thus, a bee searching in a flower patch is experiencing high optic flow that could bias distance estimation. Also, on a foraging bout, a bee might pass through several floral sources, only some of which will be of high quality. In previous studies, these low-quality sources of optic flow apparently have not affected the correct distance to the good source advertised in the waggle dance (sugar feeders), and we aim to investigate how this is achieved by conducting a suite of field experiments on several aspects of honey bee foraging behavior: Patterns of movement between multiple food sources, important parameters in measuring distance, and assessing food quality. On a bout, a bee encounters flower aggregations (patches) of different qualities. It is not known which of these patches (first, all, or best patch visited) will be advertised via the waggle dance. It is also unclear which location within a patch (closest point to the hive, middle of the patch, best flower in the patch) is coded in the dance. Previous studies have shown that the dance is not perfectly precise, yet it is not known how this imprecision affects bees ability of finding different patches, and if the levels of error change over time. Bees can guide nestmates to the best patches with the waggle dance, however, little is known about how foragers move and search for food within a patch. Moreover, the information provided in the dance is only a part of the spatial information collected by the dancer during its foraging bout. It is not known how the dancer filters the rest of the information and if she keeps the extra information for extended periods of time.

Visit #39583 @Scripps Coastal Reserve

Approved

Under Project # 30795 | Research

Honey Bee Foraging Strategies and Distance Measurement

faculty - University of California, San Diego

Reservation Members(s)

James Nieh Apr 5 - 8, 2016 (4 days)
Group of 2 Graduate Student Apr 4 - 15, 2016 (12 days)

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Mesa with Coastal Sage Scrub habitat and loop trail 2 May 2, 2016 - May 18, 2018