Schürch Roger, Ratnieks Francis L W, Samuelson Elizabeth E W, Couvillon Margaret J
Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects (LASI), University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QG, UK Clinical Trials Unit, University of Bern, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM), University of Bern, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland.
Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects (LASI), University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QG, UK.
J Exp Biol. 2016 May 1;219(Pt 9):1287-9. doi: 10.1242/jeb.134874. Epub 2016 Mar 4.
Communication signals often vary between individuals, even when one expects selection to favour accuracy and precision, such as the honey bee waggle dance, where foragers communicate to nestmates the direction and distance to a resource. Although many studies have examined intra-dance variation, or the variation within a dance, less is known about inter-dance variation, or the variation between dances. This is particularly true for distance communication. Here, we trained individually marked bees from three colonies to forage at feeders of known distances and monitored their dances to determine individual communication variation. We found that each honey bee possesses her own calibration: individual duration-distance calibrations varied significantly in both slopes and intercepts. The variation may incur a cost for communication, such that a dancer and recruit may misunderstand the communicated distance by as much as 50%. Future work is needed to understand better the mechanisms and consequences of individual variation in communication.
通讯信号通常在个体之间存在差异，即使人们预期选择会倾向于准确性和精确性，比如蜜蜂的摇摆舞，觅食者通过这种舞蹈向巢友传达资源的方向和距离。尽管许多研究已经考察了舞蹈内部的变异，即一次舞蹈中的变异，但对于舞蹈之间的变异，即不同舞蹈之间的变异，我们了解得较少。在距离通讯方面尤其如此。在这里，我们训练了来自三个蜂群的单独标记的蜜蜂，让它们在已知距离的喂食器处觅食，并监测它们的舞蹈，以确定个体通讯变异情况。我们发现，每只蜜蜂都有自己的校准：个体的持续时间-距离校准在斜率和截距上都有显著差异。这种变异可能会给通讯带来成本，以至于跳舞者和接收者可能会对传达的距离产生高达50%的误解。需要开展进一步的研究，以更好地理解通讯中个体变异的机制和后果。
