Laboratory of Functional Biology, Kagawa School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tokushima Bunri University, 1314-1 Shido, Sanuki, Kagawa 769-2193, Japan.
J Exp Biol. 2012 May 15;215(Pt 10):1633-41. doi: 10.1242/jeb.068650.
A honeybee informs her nestmates about the location of a profitable food source that she has visited by means of a waggle dance: a round dance and a figure-of-eight dance for a short- and long-distance food source, respectively. Consequently, the colony achieves an effective collection of food. However, it is still not fully understood how much effect the dance behavior has on the food collection, because most of the relevant experiments have been performed only in limited locations under limited experimental conditions. Here, we examined the efficacy of the waggle dances by physically preventing bees from dancing and then analyzing the changes in daily mass of the hive as an index of daily food collection. To eliminate place- and year-specific effects, the experiments were performed under fully natural conditions in three different cities in Japan from mid September to early October in three different years. Because the experiments were performed in autumn, all six of the tested colonies lost mass on most of the experimental days. When the dance was prevented, the daily reduction in mass change was greater than when the dance was allowed, i.e. the dance inhibited the reduction of the hive mass. This indicates that dance is effective for food collection. Furthermore, clear inhibition was observed on the first two days of the experiments; after that, inhibition was no longer evident. This result suggests that the bee colony adapted to the new environment.
圆形舞和“8”字舞分别代表短距离和长距离的食物源。因此，蜂群能够有效地采集食物。然而，舞蹈行为对食物采集的影响有多大，仍不完全清楚，因为大多数相关实验仅在有限的实验条件下在有限的地点进行。在这里，我们通过物理上阻止蜜蜂跳舞，然后分析蜂巢的每日质量变化作为每日食物采集的指标，来检验摇摆舞的功效。为了消除地点和年份的特定影响，实验在日本三个不同城市的完全自然条件下，于三年中的三个不同月份的 9 月中旬至 10 月初进行。由于实验是在秋季进行的，所有六个测试的蜂群在大多数实验日都会减重。当阻止跳舞时，每日质量变化的减少大于允许跳舞时，即舞蹈抑制了蜂巢质量的减少。这表明舞蹈对食物采集是有效的。此外，在实验的头两天观察到明显的抑制作用；之后，抑制作用不再明显。这一结果表明，蜜蜂群体适应了新的环境。
