D3148: The impact of uneven topography on waggle dance learning in Apis mellifera

Monday, November 11, 2024

9:00 AM – 5:00 PM MST

Location: Phoenix Convention Center, Exhibit Hall 6, PCC

Presenting Author(s)

Brandi Rene Sanchez (she/her/hers)

Master's Student
University of California
Chula Vista, California

Co-Author(s)

James C. Nieh, Ph.D.

Professor
University of California
La Jolla, California

European honey bee (Apis mellifera) foragers perform the waggle dance to communicate food resources to other foragers. A forager bee will walk in a figure eight pattern and vibrate her abdomen through the middle. The forager communicates three aspects about the food source. The angle and duration of the waggle phase communicates the direction and distance, and the number of repetitions of the waggle phase communicates the quality of the resource. We know honey bees socially learn this dance from older bees, but what is unknown is if honey bees have a capacity to fix the errors in their dance, a type of individual learning. The surface topology of the dance floor in hives is known to be irregular in nature, yet the importance of the surface topology of the dance floor and its effect on the ability of honey bees to learn the waggle dance has not been researched. We hypothesize individual honey bees learn to correct the errors in their waggle dance over time on irregular topography. After placing a custom irregular comb in an observation hive and recording the waggle dances of honey bees trained to a sugar feeder, we will compare recordings of foragers executing the dance on regular comb versus on irregular comb. We hypothesize foragers on the irregular comb start off with multiple errors in their dance, but these errors will decrease over time, suggesting that honey bees can learn how to dance better given the uneven topology of the dance floor.