Honeybees' waggle dance reveals bees in rural areas travel farther for
food

Date:
October 6, 2021
Source:
British Ecological Society
Summary:
By decoding honeybees' waggle dances, which tell other bees where
to find food, researchers have found that bees in agricultural
areas travel farther for food than those in urban areas.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
By decoding honeybees' waggle dances, which tell other bees where to
find food, researchers have found that bees in agricultural areas travel further for food than those in urban areas. The findings are published
in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology.


==========================================================================
In the study, researchers at Royal Holloway University and Virginia
Tech decoded 2827 waggle dances across 20 western honeybee colonies in
London and surrounding agricultural areas. The information conveyed
in the dances told the researchers that foraging trip distances were consistently shorter in urban areas compared to agricultural areas.

The researchers calculated that bees in urban areas had an average
foraging distance of 492 metres, compared to bees in agricultural areas
that had an average foraging distance of 743 metres.

They also found no significant difference in the amount of sugar collected
by the urban and rural bees, indicating that the longer foraging distances
in rural areas were not driven by far away, nectar rich resources and
that urban areas provided honeybees with consistently more available food.

Professor Elli Leadbeater of Royal Holloway University and author
of the study said: "Our findings support the idea that cities are
hotspots for social bees, with gardens providing diverse, plentiful and reliable forage resources. In agricultural areas, it is likely harder
for honeybees to find food, so they have to go further before they find
enough to bring back to the hive." The researchers warn that because
urban areas constitute a small percentage of total land cover, they are unlikely to be sufficient to support bee populations across a landscape dominated by intensive agriculture.



========================================================================== Professor Leadbeater said: "Conservation efforts should be directed
towards increasing the amount of non-crop flowers in agricultural areas,
such as wildflower strips. This would increase the consistency of forage available across the season and landscape as well as minimize bees'
reliance on small numbers of seasonal flowering crops." There are
several challenges in assessing and comparing floral resources in
different habitat types. For instance, large areas need to be surveyed
to get a good picture of flower species richness and in cities it is
almost impossible to access land in private gardens.

"In this study, we overcame the hurdles of assessing floral resources by getting the bees themselves to tell us where to find food." Said Professor Leadbeater. "Calculating the distance to forage indicated by the waggle
dances provides a real-time picture of current forage availability, from
the bees' own perspective." The waggle dance is unique to honeybees and
is used to communicate the location of floral resources to the hive. When
a honeybee returns to the hive with food, instead of immediately leaving
to forage again, they will repeat a figure of eight movement on the
honeycomb. The duration of the central run of this dance tells other
bees how far to fly, and the angle tells them which direction to take.

In the study the researchers recorded a total of 2827 waggle dances
between April and September 2017, across 20 sites: 10 in central London
to represent urban land and 10 in agricultural land in Kent, Surrey and
the other home counties. They then decoded these dances and mapped out
where the bees had been.

They also collected data on the sugar concentration from forages by
collecting 10 returning bees on each hive visit and inducing regurgitation
of collected nectar. This allowed the researchers to test their assumption
that longer foraging trips reflected a dearth of available forage rather
than the existence of distant but high-quality resources.

Because the study focussed on honeybees, which are domesticated and are
not threatened, the researchers warn that the findings will not apply
to all bee species. Professor Leadbeater said: "While we can potentially extrapolate our results to some wild bees, such as generalist bumblebee species, our results should not be used to imply that this pattern will
hold for all bee species.

For many solitary bees, the existence of specialist
host plant species or nesting sites will be important
in determining whether cities are valuable habitats." ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by British_Ecological_Society. Note:
Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Ash E. Samuelson, Roger Schu"rch, Ellouise Leadbeater. Dancing bees
evaluate central urban forage resources as superior to agricultural
land.

Journal of Applied Ecology, 2021 DOI: 10.1111/1365-2664.14011 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211006080552.htm

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