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Honey Bees Waggle Dance

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There are many animals that rely solely on sharing information of food sources with their conspecifics in order to survive (Wilson 1971). Social insects are well known to partake in this type of behavior. Whether it is by trail pheromones, directly guiding the conspecific to the food source or in some cases signaling, such as the vibratory waggle dance of the honey bee, increases foraging effort (Frisch 1967; Jarau & Hrncir 2009). Honey bees’ waggle dance is well understood and known to provide their nest mates with information on not only the presence of valuable food sources but also the exact location and quality of the food source (Couvillon 2012; Frisch 1967). The main component of this dance is called the waggle run which is when a …show more content…
2012). The waggle run contains the most vital information about the food source by sharing not only the distance but the direction of the food source from the hive to other nest mates (Frisch 1967; Toufailia et al. 2012). Due to Karl von Frisch’s data, we know that dance followers are able to use the information in the waggle dance to find the indicated food source (Biesmeijer & Seeley 2005). Previous studies have found that depending on the quality of the food source, a worker bee may perform up to 100 waggle runs in a single dance (Frisch 1967; Seeley et al. 2000). But how many waggle runs do other bees need to follow until they can accurately locate the food source? It was proposed that it only took foragers 5 waggle runs to obtain enough information to …show more content…
After collecting data from April, May, July and September, Toufailia and his team found that 90% of followers only followed one to five waggle runs in order to accurately find a food source while only 2% followed more than 10 waggle runs, confirming Biesmeijer’s results from his 2005 study (Toufailia et al. 2012). Toufailia’s explanation for his result corresponding with Biesmeijer’s was due to their usage of natural food sources. He further explained that other studies that stated higher amount of waggle runs needed to find food sources was due to them using unnatural food sources. That being said, I believe there are other variables that could cause the bees to seem like they don’t follow as many waggle runs as those who use unnatural food sources that Toufailia failed to mention. One being that they didn’t mark the bees so they had no way of knowing whether bees followed only a few waggle runs and then later returned to the same dance to receive more information about the location of the food. It is also possible that these followers followed other dances and were aware of better food sources so didn’t deem it important to keep following the next

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