QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s):
Home     Help     Feedback     Subscriptions     Archive     Search     Table of Contents

First published online October 21, 2005
Journal of Experimental Biology 208, 4049-4061 (2005)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2005
doi: 10.1242/jeb.01869

This Article Summary Full Text Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Towne, W. F. Articles by Shinn, L. M. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Towne, W. F. Articles by Shinn, L. M.

Does swarming cause honey bees to update their solar ephemerides?

William F. Towne^*, Christopher M. Baer, Sarah J. Fabiny and Lisa M. Shinn

Department of Biology, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, Kutztown, PA 19530, USA

View larger version (134K): [in a new window]   Fig. 1. Aerial views of the field sites indicating locations of hives (H) and feeders (F). White arrows are 200 m long and indicate the bees' outward flights to the feeders. North is indicated by black arrowheads. The agricultural fields adjacent to the treelines sloped downward away from the treelines; adjacent contour lines are separated by 6.1 m of elevation. Different sites served as donor and recipient sites in different experiments. The north-facing treeline (A) is at 75°47'12.1'W, 40°37'6.4'N, and the south-facing treeline (B) is at 75°47'12.6'W, 40°36'56.7'N.

View larger version (24K): [in a new window]   Fig. 2. Dance indications of native and transplanted bees under overcast conditions on 28 July 2002. Each symbol represents the visual average of at least five wagging runs during a single bout of dancing; each bee was scored only once after a single trip to the feeder. The hive was at the south-facing treeline (Fig. 1B), where the direction to the feeder, and thus the correct dance indication, was 87.5° clockwise (CW) of N (Current site, horizontal black line in each panel). The predicted direction for dances oriented by memory of the sun's course at the north-facing treeline (Fig. 1A), to which the transplanted bees were native, was 253.5° (Natal site, horizontal gray line in each panel). (A) Bees native to the current site; (B) newly transplanted bees released on the day of the observations; (C) long-term transplantees, released at the current site 2-15 days earlier. Bimodal dances are indicated by broken vertical lines connecting the two dance directions. The sky bar above each panel indicates sky conditions: black indicates complete overcast; white indicates that the sun was visible; shading indicates the sun peeking frequently in and out. There were no periods of blue sky without sun. The sun first appeared at 8:22 h LST, indicated on each panel by the thin vertical line running the entire height of the graph. Statistical analyses here and below exclude dances occurring after the sun first appeared.

View larger version (20K): [in a new window]   Fig. 3. Dance indications of native and transplanted bees under overcast on 27 July 2002. (A) Bees native to the current site; (B) newly transplanted bees that had less than one full day's experience under mostly cloudy skies at the current site; (C) long-term transplantees. All other symbols and conventions as in Fig. 2.

View larger version (22K): [in a new window]   Fig. 4. Dance indications of native and transplanted bees under overcast on 14 July 2002. All symbols and conventions as in Figs 2 and 3.

View larger version (29K): [in a new window]   Fig. 5. Hovering (A) and circling (B) learning flights of bees transplanted by three different techniques: caging small groups of foragers (Ai, Bi), moving the entire hive intact (Aii, Bii), and putting the colonies through a swarming process as they were transplanted (Aiii, Biii). Note that the scales of the graphs for the hovering flights (A) and circling flights (B) are different. Also shown in each panel is the mean flight duration ± S.D. and the sample size, the latter in parentheses. The flight durations for Swarms 1 and 3 are indistinguishable (Aiii, Biii; shaded compared to black), so the results from the two swarms are pooled for statistical comparisons with the other groups (see Materials and methods).

View larger version (22K): [in a new window]   Fig. 6. Dance indications of non-swarmed control bees (A) and Swarm 1 bees (B,C) under cloudy skies. Unlike the previous figures, the three panels are not from the same day: A and B are from 15 July 2000, while C is from 17 July 2000. Sky bars and other conventions as in Figs 2, 3, 4, except that shaded regions on the sky bar indicate periods when blue sky was visible but not the sun. Note also that the current (recipient) site is now the north-facing treeline, making the `current site' prediction 253.5°.

View larger version (19K): [in a new window]   Fig. 7. Dance indications of non-swarmed control bees (A), Swarm 2 bees (B), and Swarm 3 bees (C), under cloudy skies on 14 August 2000. Sky bar and other conventions as in Fig. 6. In B, consecutive dances of the two bees that danced the most are connected by thin black lines. In C, the dances of the four individual bees that indicated only the natal site prediction before the sun became visible are labeled with each bee's identifying tag.