The Lives of Bees by Thomas D. Seeley

The Lives of Bees by Thomas D. Seeley

Author:Thomas D. Seeley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-03-28T00:00:00+00:00


FIG. 8.6. Top: Distribution of distances to a colony’s forage sites, based on analysis of 1,871 waggle dances. Bottom: Coding of distance information in waggle dance: the duration of each waggle run is proportional to the length of the outbound flight.

The most impressive demonstration of a honey bee colony’s capacity for long-range foraging comes from a study conducted by Madeleine Beekman and Francis L. W. Ratnieks, with a colony living in an observation hive located within the city of Sheffield, in England. They video-recorded and then decoded 444 waggle dances performed by their colony’s foragers on three days in the middle of August 1996, a time when vast patches of a major nectar source, ling heather (Calluna vulgaris), were in full bloom on the moors in the Peak District west of Sheffield. Their data analysis revealed that their study colony foraged in two areas, one relatively close to the hive, less than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) away, and one much farther away, 5–10 kilometers (3.1 to 6.2 miles). Overall, 50 percent of the dances performed in their observation hive represented sites more than 6 kilometers (3.6 miles) from the hive, and 10 percent represented sites more than 9.5 kilometers (5.9 miles) away! Clearly, there are times when a honey bee colony benefits greatly from having workers with a long maximum flight range, for this endows its food-collection operation with a vast scope.



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