Okada R, Ikeno H, Kimura T, Ohashi Mizue, Aonuma H, Ito E
Kagawa School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Tokushima Bunri University, Sanuki, Kagawa 769-2193, Japan.
Acta Biol Hung. 2012;63 Suppl 2:75-9. doi: 10.1556/ABiol.63.2012.Suppl.2.8.
A honeybee informs her nestmates of the location of a flower by doing a waggle dance. The waggle dance encodes both the direction of and distance to the flower from the hive. To reveal how the waggle dance benefits the colony, we created a Markov model of bee foraging behavior and performed simulation experiments by incorporating the biological parameters that we obtained from our own observations of real bees as well as from the literature. When two feeders were each placed 400 m away from the hive in different directions, a virtual colony in which honeybees danced and correctly transferred information (a normal, real bee colony) made significantly greater numbers of successful visits to the feeders compared to a colony with inaccurate information transfer. Howerer, when five feeders were each located 400 m from the hive, the inaccurate information transfer colony performed better than the normal colony. These results suggest that dancing's ability to communicate accurate information depends on the number of feeders. Furthermore, because non-dancing colonies always made significantly fewer visits than those two colonies, we concluded that dancing behavior is beneficial for hives' ability to visit food sources.
蜜蜂通过跳摇摆舞向巢友告知花朵的位置。摇摆舞编码了花朵相对于蜂巢的方向和距离。为了揭示摇摆舞如何使蜂群受益，我们创建了一个蜜蜂觅食行为的马尔可夫模型，并通过纳入我们自己对真实蜜蜂的观察以及文献中获得的生物学参数来进行模拟实验。当两个喂食器分别放置在距离蜂巢400米的不同方向时，与信息传递不准确的蜂群相比，蜜蜂跳舞并正确传递信息的虚拟蜂群（正常的真实蜂群）对喂食器的成功访问次数显著更多。然而，当五个喂食器每个都位于距离蜂巢400米处时，信息传递不准确的蜂群表现优于正常蜂群。这些结果表明，跳舞传递准确信息的能力取决于喂食器的数量。此外，由于不跳舞的蜂群访问次数总是明显少于这两个蜂群，我们得出结论，跳舞行为有利于蜂巢访问食物源的能力。
