P. Kirk Visscher

Foraging Strategy of Honeybee Colonies in a Temperate Deciduous Forest

To understand the foraging strategy of honeybee colonies, we measured certain tem- poral and spatial patterns in the foraging activities of a colony living in a temperate deciduous forest. We monitored foraging activities by housing the colony in an observation hive and reading its re- cruitment dances to map its food source patches. We found that the colony routinely foraged several kilometres from its nest (median 1.7 km, 95% of foraging within 6.0 km), frequently (at least daily) adjusted its distribution of foragers on its patches, and worked relatively few patches each day (mean of 9.7 patches accounted for 90% of each days forage). These foraging patterns, together with prior studies on the mechanisms of honeybee recruitment communication, indicate that the foraging strategy of a honeybee colony involves surveying the food source patches within a vast area around its nest, pooling the reconnaissance of its many foragers, and using this information to focus its forager force on a few high-quality patches within its foraging area.

A quantitative study of worker reproduction in honey bee colonies

SummaryIn 11 Apis mellifera colonies with laying queens, about 0.12% of the males produced derived from eggs laid by workers. This result requires explanation both of why workers produce any males, and, since they do, why they produce so few. Workers may maximize their inclusive fitness by forgoing reproduction, or their sterility may be due to to enforcement of the interests of the queen or those of other workers. The presence of laying workers might then result from developmental noise in the workers, from a failure of communication of the queens presence, or a failure of enforcement mechanisms. Selection for worker reproduction in colonies following queen loss may also play a role in shaping worker reproduction in colonies with a queen. The hypothesis of worker sterility enforced by other workers seems most likely to be correct, but further studies on these hypotheses are needed.

Reproductive conflict in honey bees: a stalemate of worker egg-laying and policing

Abstract Using electrophoretic markers, eggs laid by workers were identified in honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies with a queen. Based on extrapolation, these represented about 7% of the unfertilized (male) eggs laid in the colonies. A very small proportion of workers (of the order of 0.01%) lay these eggs. Worker-laid eggs are rapidly removed, so that very few sons of workers are reared. Thus the reproductive cooperation in bee colonies is maintained by ongoing antagonistic interactions among the members of the colony, with worker laying and egg removal policing by other workers being relatively common.

Survival of honeybees in cold climates: the critical timing of colony growth and reproduction

Abstract. 1. The adaptive significance of the timing of growth and reproduction by honeybee, Apis mellifera L., colonies in cold climates was studied by describing the seasonal patterns of food storage, brood rearing, and swarming, and then observing the consequences of experimentally perturbing the seasonal cycles of brood rearing and swarming.

Quorum sensing during nest-site selection by honeybee swarms

This study addresses a question about the nest-site selection process of honeybee swarms: how do the scout bees know when to initiate the preparation for their swarm’s move to their new home? We tested the quorum-sensing hypothesis: that the scouts do this by noting when one of the potential nest sites under consideration is being visited by a sufficiently large number of scouts. A falsifiable prediction of this hypothesis is that delaying the formation of a quorum of scout bees at a swarm’s chosen nest cavity, while leaving the rest of the decision-making process undisturbed, should delay the start of worker piping (the prepare-for-takeoff signal) and thus the takeoff of the swarm. In paired trials, we presented each of four swarms once with five nest boxes close to each other at a site and once with a single nest box. The multiple nest boxes caused the scouts visiting the site to be dispersed among five identical nest cavities rather than concentrated at one. We observed long delays in the start of piping and the start of takeoff in the five-nest-box trials relative to the one-nest-box trials. These results provide strong support for the quorum-sensing hypothesis.

Honeybee colonies achieve fitness through dancing

The honeybee dance language, in which foragers perform dances containing information about the distance and direction to food sources, is the quintessential example of symbolic communication in non-primates. The dance language has been the subject of controversy, and of extensive research into the mechanisms of acquiring, decoding and evaluating the information in the dance. The dance language has been hypothesized, but not shown, to increase colony food collection. Here we show that colonies with disoriented dances (lacking direction information) recruit less effectively to syrup feeders than do colonies with oriented dances. For colonies foraging at natural sources, the direction information sometimes increases food collected, but at other times it makes no difference. The food-location information in the dance is presumably important when food sources are hard to find, variable in richness and ephemeral. Recruitment based simply on arousal of foragers and communication of floral odour, as occurs in honeybees, bumble bees and some stingless bees, can be equally effective under other circumstances. Clarifying the condition-dependent payoffs of the dance language provides new insight into its function in honeybee ecology.

Kinship discrimination in queen rearing by honey bees (Apis mellifera)

Apis mellifera workers are able to discriminate the degree of relatedness to themselves of larvae and to preferentially rear queens from related larvae. They employ cues of genetic, not environmental origin, and workers which have only experienced unrelated brood nonetheless prefer related (but novel) over unrelated (but familiar) larvae. Thus worker bees possess the sensory capabilities and behavioral responses that would enable them to maximize their individual inclusive fitness through nepotism in queen rearing.

The honey bee way of death: Necrophoric behaviour in Apis mellifera colonies

Abstract Within a honey bee ( Apis mellifera ) colony there are individuals who specialize in the removal of the dead (necrophoresis). Necrophoric behaviour is an essential adaptation to social life in enclosed nests, and the rapidity of corpse removal distinguishes it from general nest-cleaning behaviour. In recognition of a corpse within the nest, worker bees probably use chemical cues appearing very rapidly after the death of a bee; thoroughly extracted or paraffin-coated bees are removed slowly. The bees specializing in necrophoric behaviour comprise one or two per cent of the colony population.

Collective decisions and cognition in bees

In a remarkable example of collective decision-making, swarms of honeybees, Apis mellifera, choose one of many nest sites discovered and reported by their scouts. At first, dancing scouts communicate the location of many sites, but within a few days all dances focus on the same high-quality site. Instead of swarms acquiring global information by direct comparison of sites, , we find that the swarms decision arises through a self-organized process driven by the dynamics of interacting individuals following simple rules based on local information.

Swarm cognition in honey bees

We synthesize findings from neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral biology to show that some key features of cognition in the neuron-based brains of vertebrates are also present in the insect-based swarm of honey bees. We present our ideas in the context of the cognitive task of nest-site selection by honey bee swarms. After reviewing the mechanisms of distributed evidence gathering and processing that are the basis of decision making in bee swarms, we point out numerous similarities in the functional organization of vertebrate brains and honey bee swarms. These include the existence of interconnected subunits, parallel processing of information, a spatially distributed memory, layered processing of information, lateral inhibition, and mechanisms of focusing attention on critical stimuli. We also review the performance of simulated swarms in standard psychological tests of decision making: tests of discrimination ability and assessments of distractor effects.