Ohlinger Bradley D, Couvillon Margaret J, Carstensen Laurence W, Schürch Roger
Odum School of Ecology University of Georgia Athens Georgia USA.
Department of Entomology Virginia Tech Blacksburg Virginia USA.
Ecol Evol. 2025 May 15;15(5):e71401. doi: 10.1002/ece3.71401. eCollection 2025 May.
Optimal foraging theory (OFT) predicts that animals employ foraging strategies that maximize a particular currency, such as net energetic efficiency, to meet their nutritional demands. Two nonexclusive patterns that arise from OFT are convergence on high-quality resources and resource partitioning. Honey bees make collective decisions by integrating their individual foraging with social recruitment behaviors: returning foragers communicate the approximate vector to high-quality resources using waggle dances. Because we can eavesdrop on their communications, waggle dance decoding is a valuable tool for exploring OFT predictions as it allows us to map how honey bees use landscapes. In this study, we analyzed 8049 dances from colocalized colonies across three landscapes to investigate whether neighboring colonies forage by not partitioning patches (i.e., converging their food collection on the same patches), by partitioning at the landscape level, or by partitioning at the local level. To differentiate between these three possible scenarios, we examined three metrics: (1) interdance distances between and within colonies; (2) k-nearest neighbors; and (3) k-means clustering. We observed no difference in the distances between dances performed by bees from the same colony compared to those from different colonies. Also, we found at each of the three field sites that dances from the same colony were not more likely to appear as close neighbors to each other. Finally, k-means cluster analysis demonstrates that dance locations advertised by the same colony aggregated nonrandomly in the three sites, where dances from the same colony comprised a significant majority of dances within k-means clusters and 62% of clusters consisted entirely of dances from a single colony. Together, these results support a foraging scenario where honey bees partition their foraging, but at the local level. This strategy may help limit intercolony foraging competition.
最优觅食理论（OFT）预测，动物会采用能使特定指标（如净能量效率）最大化的觅食策略，以满足其营养需求。最优觅食理论产生的两种并非相互排斥的模式是趋向于高质量资源和资源划分。蜜蜂通过将个体觅食与社会招募行为相结合来做出集体决策：归巢的觅食者通过摆尾舞传达指向高质量资源的大致方向。由于我们能够偷听它们的交流，摆尾舞解码是探索最优觅食理论预测的宝贵工具，因为它使我们能够描绘蜜蜂如何利用景观。在本研究中，我们分析了来自三个景观中同地分布蜂群的8049次舞蹈，以调查相邻蜂群是不进行斑块划分觅食（即把食物采集集中在相同斑块上）、在景观层面进行划分，还是在局部层面进行划分。为了区分这三种可能的情况，我们考察了三个指标：（1）蜂群之间和蜂群内部舞蹈之间的距离；（2）k近邻；（3）k均值聚类。我们观察到，来自同一蜂群的蜜蜂所跳舞蹈与来自不同蜂群的蜜蜂所跳舞蹈之间的距离没有差异。此外，我们发现在三个野外地点中的每一个地点，来自同一蜂群的舞蹈彼此之间并不更有可能成为近邻。最后，k均值聚类分析表明，同一蜂群宣传的舞蹈位置在这三个地点非随机聚集，在k均值聚类中，来自同一蜂群的舞蹈占舞蹈总数的很大比例，并且62%的聚类完全由来自单个蜂群的舞蹈组成。这些结果共同支持了一种觅食情况，即蜜蜂进行觅食划分，但在局部层面。这种策略可能有助于限制蜂群间的觅食竞争。
