Sherman Gavin, Visscher P Kirk
Department of Entomology, University of California, Riverside, California 92521, USA.
Nature. 2002 Oct 31;419(6910):920-2. doi: 10.1038/nature01127.
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.
蜜蜂舞蹈语言是指觅食者通过舞蹈传递食物源距离和方向信息的方式，是非灵长类动物中符号交流的典型例子。这种舞蹈语言一直是争议的焦点，并且人们对获取、解读和评估舞蹈中信息的机制进行了广泛研究。有人曾推测舞蹈语言能增加蜂群的食物采集量，但尚未得到证实。在此我们表明，舞蹈方向混乱（缺乏方向信息）的蜂群与舞蹈方向正常的蜂群相比，在招募蜜蜂前往糖浆喂食器方面效率较低。对于在自然食物源觅食的蜂群，方向信息有时会增加采集到的食物量，但有时并无差异。当食物源难以找到、丰富程度不一且短暂易逝时，舞蹈中的食物位置信息可能至关重要。在其他情况下，像蜜蜂、熊蜂和一些无刺蜂那样，仅仅基于刺激觅食者并传递花香气味的招募方式可能同样有效。阐明舞蹈语言在不同条件下的收益，为其在蜜蜂生态中的功能提供了新的见解。
