From dyads to collectives: a review of honeybee signalling

Hasenjager, Matthew J.; Franks, Victoria R.; Leadbeater, Ellouise

Abstract

The societies of honeybees (Apis spp.) are microcosms of divided labour where the fitness interests of individuals are so closely aligned that, in some contexts, the colony behaves as an entity in itself. Self-organization at this extraordinary level requires sophisticated communication networks, so it is not surprising that the celebrated waggle dance, by which bees share information about locations outside the hive, evolved here. Yet bees within the colony respond to several other lesser-known signalling systems, including the tremble dance, the stop signal and the shaking signal, whose roles in coordinating worker behaviour are not yet fully understood. Here, we firstly bring together the large but disparate historical body of work that has investigated the “meaning” of such signals for individual bees, before going on to discuss how network-based approaches can show how such signals function as a complex system to control the collective foraging effort of these remarkable social insect societies.

Citation

Hasenjager, M. J., Franks, V. R., & Leadbeater, E. (2022). From dyads to collectives: a review of honeybee signalling. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 76(9), https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-022-03218-1

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 24, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Aug 22, 2022
• Publication Date: 2022-09
• Deposit Date: Jun 11, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 17, 2024
• Journal: Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
• Print ISSN: 0340-5443
• Electronic ISSN: 1432-0762
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 76
• Issue: 9
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-022-03218-1