The honey bee, Apis mellifera L., stop signal: evaluating its uses

Honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) are capable of communicating with their nestmates using a varied repertoire of signals. The stop signal is an acoustic signal understood to be used as negative feedback and has the effect of decreasing recruitment to food sources. This has been observed when foragers experienced danger or overcrowding at the food source or because they were not able to unload their food quickly upon re-entering their hive. In this recent effort, a comb in an observation hive was manipulated to be empty, giving the bees ample storage space for new food, or full, so that there was little space available to store food to determine whether or not the amount of space available to the bees would affect the rates of stop signaling heard in the hive. It was expected that under full conditions a greater number of stop signals would be heard as compared to empty conditions. Preliminary results show that there were somewhat higher numbers of stop signals when the colony was full than when it was empty (p-value=0.09), however, this is an ongoing project that will be repeated with more colonies for greater accuracy of results.