ミツバチのダンス「ワグルダンス」のスタイルが餌探索の成功率に影響を与えることを発見(Honeybee Dance ‘Styles’ Sway Food Foraging Success)

2025-02-24 バージニア工科大学 (Virginia Tech)

A honeybee doing the waggle dance to entice her sisters to a tasty food source. Photo by Roger Schürch for Virginia Tech.

<関連情報>

• https://news.vt.edu/articles/2025/02/cals-honeybee-waggle-dance.html
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960982224017159

ミツバチにおけるコミュニケーションの成功は個体性に影響される Individuality impacts communication success in honey bees

Laura C. McHenry, Roger Schürch, Lindsay E. Johnson, Bradley D. Ohlinger, Margaret J. Couvillon
Current Biology  Available online: 24 February 2025
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.12.047

Summary

In eusocial insects, individual variation and its influence on emergent outcomes, like communication success between foragers, remain poorly understood¹. The honey bee waggle dance is a celebrated communication behavior that conveys to nestmates a distance and direction from the hive to a valuable resource, usually nectar or pollen². Intriguingly, each forager possesses an individual calibration to communicate the resource’s distance³, but the effect of this individuality on recruitment success is unknown. Here we tested whether the magnitude and/or direction of calibration mismatch in dancer–follower dyads affects their ability to communicate. We created fully-marked observation colonies and trained bees to forage from artificial feeders at known distances. Concurrently, we filmed dances inside the colony to identify successful dancer–follower dyads. We then compared the distribution of calibration mismatch values among these successful dyads (n = 30) to a simulated expected distribution based on a null hypothesis of random assortment of calibration values. Surprisingly, mismatch magnitude did not affect recruitment (p = 0.74), but mismatch direction did: followers predicted to overshoot the resource were over-represented among successful dyads compared to the null distribution (p = 0.03). Overall, our data demonstrate that the calibration relationship in dancer–follower dyads, created by individual differences, can shape communication outcomes.