THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ODOR CUES AND DANCE LANGUAGE INFORMATION FOR THE FOOD SEARCH BEHAVIOR OF HONEYBEES (HYMENOPTERA, APIDAE)

Although several independent lines of evidence show that bees can make use of information provided by their dance language, there is an ongo ing controversy about the significance of the dance information versus odor cues in the search behavior of recruited bees. A series of exper iments was performed to assess the relative significance of dance info rmation and odors for the site-specific search of recruit bees. In the se experiments recruit bees were trapped automatically at arrays of ar tificial powers at various distances from the hive. are distribution o f directions in which the recruits searched for food was compared betw een recruitment by dancers performing well-oriented dances on the vert ical side of the comb and dancers performing disoriented dances on a h orizontal comb. The results show quantitatively that bees use both odo r cues and the dance information, The greater the distance to the feed ing site, the greater is the relative significance of the dance inform ation.