Tuesday, 16 November 2004 - 8:48 AM
0075

Do African bees use different dance dialect than European bees?

Devrim Oskay, doskay@yahoo.com1, Sayra Reyes, benny@hotmail.com2, and Tugrul Giray, tgiray2@yahoo.com2. (1) Univ. of Puerto Rico and Trakya Universitesi, Tekirdag Ziraat Fakultesi, Tekirdag, PR, Turkey, (2) Univ. of Puerto Rico, Dept. of Biology, P.O. Box 23360, San Juan, PR

Honey bees can communicate with each other through the dance language. Dance language indicates the location and quality of the food source. Honey bees do a round dance for resources at short distances and a waggle dance for far distances. Bee races have different dialects.We wanted to compare dance language in African and European bees. African bees are adapted to tropical habitats where the resources are patchy. On the other hand European bees are adapted to temperate habitats where resources are abundant temporarily.We studied the effect of distances to food source on dances type in African and European bees. We predicted African bees would be more precise in indianting location as an adaptation to resources patchy in space. Our results show that African bees change dance type at a shorter distance and have less variable waggle dance angles than European bees. These results show that dance dialect of African bees is more precise indicating resourse location than dance dialect of European bees (A.m.ligustica).


Species 1: Hymenoptera Apidae Apis mellifera (honey bees)
Keywords: dance language

[ Recorded presentation ] Recorded presentation

See more of Ten-Minute Papers, Section Cb. Apiculture and Social Insects, Cd. Behavior and Ecology
See more of Ten-Minute Papers, Section C, Biology, Ecology, and Behavior

See more of The 2004 ESA Annual Meeting and Exhibition