Bloomington Cooperative Living

For a honeybee swarm of many individuals, choosing a home is a momentous decision. Failing to choose a single location may cause the swarm to split. Studies over the past 60 years have shown that honeybee swarms use quorum sensing, a form of decentralized decision-making, to choose a suitable nest site, but many gaps remain in our understanding of this process.

Basically, honeybees have created two different committees: the scouting committee and the bivouacking committee. The scouting committee is responsible for locating suitable new homes. The bivouacking committee is responsible for seeding the new house, once chosen. The scouters are usually some of the most experienced workers in the colony. Upon their return from scouting, they advertise potential locations and their qualities by performing a waggle dance straight across the bivouacking bees. Waggle dances recruit additional scouts until a quorum number is reached and the swarm prepares to move to its new home.

Until now, this was all we thought was going on. But in a recent article, Seeley et al. (Science 6, vol 335, Jan 2012) show that there’s also an inhibitory signal between bees advocating different locations. Essentially, in the case that there is more than one good option, you have several groups of bees dancing for their preference. And every once in a while, a worker bee will stop doing its dance, and give a “vibratory head butt” to a bee that’s doing a dance for a different site, to inhibit it.

Woodlandia has traditionally consented to waggle dancing, but we haven’t discussed the use of vibratory head butting yet. We will gather on Sunday morning to discuss these new findings. In the case that we collectively decide to protest against bee coercion, we will have (vegan) pancakes ready for pouring honey all over them.

Sunday, 9am. Join.