Abstract
Social interactions with heterospecifics can yield important insights into the flexibility of behaviour and the role of learning in communication. Recently, the honeybee dance, a unique symbolic communication system to communicate positions in space, has been shown to involve learning. We asked if this communication system could potentially be learned by members of a species not normally using this communication system, the bumblebee(Bombus terrestris)—indicating that learning might have been at the origins of dance communication. We used mixed-species colonies of bumblebees and honeybees (Apis millefera) to investigate how the readiness to first establish contact with dancers might develop in uninformed bumblebee foragers. Over a month of observations, we recorded and classified a series of behavioural patterns in newly emerged honeybees introduced into queenright bumblebee colonies. A small subset of the introduced honeybees was able to establish in the nests and displayed their typical behavioural patterns, including homing, dance communication, trophallaxis, and social grooming. Remarkably, grooming and trophallaxis were also displayed to heterospecifics, and bumblebees accepted both, including food offered through trophallaxis, even though this behaviour is not normally used by bumblebees. However, bumblebees never attended honeybees’ waggle dances. Our results contribute to insights about bee social behaviour and cognition by providing a fascinating example of the adaptive use and modification of innate behaviour.
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The footage and datasets generated and analysed during this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Meredith Johnson for the illustrations in Fig. 3, Dr. James Makinson for technical advice, Dr. Paul Hurd for kindly supplying newly emerged honeybees, and Amelia Kowalewska for help with video recording.
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JER-G was supported by CONACyT and QMUL, CVU 446980, and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under grant 300148.
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JER-G, CS, LC: study conception and experimental design; JER-G: data collection; JER-G: data analysis; JER-G wrote the paper; all authors were involved in data interpretation and manuscript revisions.
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Romero-González, J.E., Solvi, C., Peng, F. et al. Behaviour of honeybees integrated into bumblebee nests and the responses of their hosts. Apidologie 55, 50 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-024-01086-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-024-01086-4