Honeybees vary communication and collective decision making across landscapes

Abstract

Honeybee (Apis mellifera) colony foraging decisions arise from the waggle dances of individual foragers, processed and filtered through a series of feedback loops that produce emergent collective behaviour. This process is an example of animal communication at the height of eusociality, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that its value for colony foraging success is heavily dependent on local ecology. Although colonies are thought to vary their use of the waggle dance in response to local ecological conditions, this is yet to be empirically established. Here, we quantify waggle dance use based on colony level dance-decoding and show that the impact of dance use on collective foraging is clear in some colonies but nearly negligible in others. We outline how these estimates of dance use can be combined with land-use data to explore the landscape characteristics that drive collective foraging. Our methodology provides a means to quantify the real-world importance of a celebrated example of animal communication and opens the door to the exploration of the selection pressures that may have driven the evolution of this remarkable collective behaviour.