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First published online November 14, 2008
Journal of Experimental Biology 211, 3691-3697 (2008)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2008
doi: 10.1242/jeb.021071
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Sensory coding of nest-site value in honeybee swarms

Thomas D. Seeley1,* and P. Kirk Visscher2

1 Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
2 Department of Entomology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA


Figure 1
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  		Fig. 1. Conceptual framework for decision making that illustrates the processing stages for making a decision (left) and the application of this framework to the mechanisms of nest-site choice by a honeybee swarm (right). A sensory transformation takes primary sensory input and generates an internal representation of the alternatives, including a coding of their values. A decision transformation uses this sensory representation to build a distribution of evidence among the alternatives, with more evidence accumulating at the higher value alternatives. A final processing stage produces the actual decision, transforming the evidence distribution into a discrete choice of action. Adapted from Sugrue et al. (Sugrue et al., 2005Go).

 

Figure 2
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  		Fig. 2. Activities of the 11 marked scout bees in the 17 July 2007 trial. In the horizontal timeline for each bee, black diamonds denote sightings of the bee at the nest box, white bars show blocks of time at the swarm cluster, and black bars within the white bars indicate periods of waggle dancing. Numbers above the black bars specify the number of dance circuits performed. Color code of bee marking: R, Red; O, Orange; Y, Yellow; G, Green; B, Blue; W, White; RW, Red–White, etc.

 

Figure 3
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  		Fig. 3. Distributions of the number of dance circuits produced per scout bee, for bees reporting on either a 40 l (high value) nest box or a 15 l (medium value) nest box. The number shown for each bee is the sum of all dance circuits that she produced over her multiple returns to the swarm cluster. Black arrows indicate the median values for the two distributions.

 

Figure 4
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  		Fig. 4. Pattern of nest-site scouts performing shorter and shorter dances over consecutive returns to the swarm cluster. (A) Each line indicates the average pattern of reduced dancing for scout bees that danced during one, two, three or four consecutive returns to swarm. A total of 78 scout bees were observed, and 51 performed dances: 24 danced during just one return to the swarm, 11 danced during two returns, eight danced during three returns, seven danced during four returns, and one (not shown) danced during six returns. For an example of a bee producing increasingly shorter dances over four consecutive returns to the swarm, see the bee Orange (O) in Fig. 2. (B) Summary plot of the decay in dancing by nest-site scouts over consecutive returns to the swarm. Each data point represents the mean of the values shown in A; error bars represent ± 1 s.e.m. The overall rate of dance decay is –17.2 dance circuits per return to the swarm cluster.

 

Figure 5
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  		Fig. 5. The probability, for a given-size group of scout bees reporting on either the 40 l nest box or the 15 l nest box, that the total number of dance circuits (= signals) produced will be greater for the group reporting on the 40 l nest box. Probabilities were calculated by taking 240 random samples from each of the two distributions of dance circuits per bee shown in Fig. 3. Next, the samples from each distribution were grouped consecutively into 240 groups of size 1, 120 groups of size 2, 80 groups of size 3, etc., and the dance circuits produced by the bees in each group were summed. Then, for each group size, the dance circuit totals were compared between matched pairs of groups (e.g. the first group of size 2 from the 40 l distribution was paired with the first group of size 2 from the 15 l distribution). In the 240 comparisons of group size 1, 81.4% of the groups reporting on the 40 l nest box produced more dances; in the 120 comparisons of group size 2, 85.0% of the groups reporting on the 40 l nest box produced more dance circuits; and so forth until in the 40 comparisons of group size 6, 100% of the groups reporting on the 40 l nest box produced more dance circuits.

 

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© The Company of Biologists Ltd 2008