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First published online October 17, 2008
Journal of Experimental Biology 211, 3392-3400 (2008)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2008
doi: 10.1242/jeb.017624
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The response of the honeybee dance to uncertain rewards

Sandra Seefeldt and Rodrigo J. De Marco*

Freie Universität Berlin, Fachbereich Biologie/Chemie/Pharmazie, Institut für Biologie–Neurobiologie, Königin-Luise-Strasse 28-30, D-14195 Berlin, Germany

* Author for correspondence (e-mail: demarco{at}neurobiologie.fu-berlin.de)

Accepted 1 September 2008

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.

Key words: Apis mellifera, reward uncertainty, recruitment dances, risk-sensitive behaviour, reward learning


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© The Company of Biologists Ltd 2008