Sherman and Visscher, 2002 (dancing honeybees)

Question 1

This study finds that honeybee colonies with … dances (… direction information) recruit less effectively to syrup feeders than do colonies with … dances.

Answer 1

disoriented, lacking, oriented

Question 2

For colonies foraging at … sources, the … information sometimes increases food collected, but at other times it makes no difference.

Answer 2

natural, direction

Question 3

Recruitment based simply on … of foragers and communication of floral … can be equally effective under certain circumstances

Answer 3

arousal, odour

Question 4

The payoffs of the dance language are …-…

Answer 4

condition-dependent (e.g. vary with how hard food sources are to find, variation in richness and ephemerality)

Question 5

In certain species, the dances are usually done on a vertical comb in a dark nest cavity, and the directional reference is … (representing the sun’s …).

In other species, the dance is performed on a horizontal surface with a reference to the sun’s azimuth detected from a direct view of the sun, sky … or ….

Answer 5

upward, azimuth, polarisation, landmarks

Question 6

When on a horizontal comb in the dark, or diffused light, bees still dance, but in … …, and the indication of … is also disrupted. Bees will also interpret spots of … light as the sun or particular regions of the polarised sky.

Answer 6

random directions, distance, artificial

Question 7

What were the two treatments in this study?

Answer 7

Diffuse-light treatment - in which bees performed completely disoriented dances

Oriented-light treatment - in which bees performed well-oriented dances

(horizontal hives were used and observed)

Question 8

The direction of waggle-runs (transcribed from videotapes) in the diffuse-light treatment…

Answer 8

did not differ from a circular random distribution

Question 9

The dances in the oriented light treatment were…

Answer 9

highly directionally oriented - similar to dances on a vertical comb

Question 10

The colonies received opposite light treatments in the first half of the observation, then were ….

Answer 10

switched

for recruitment part of experiment

Question 11

In three trials, at different distances from the colony, significantly more recruits arrived at feeders while…

Answer 11

the colony had oriented dances than arrived when it had disoriented dances

+ no time-day effects on recruit numbers

Question 12

There was no significant effect of light treatment on…

Answer 12

the mean number of bees dancing

Question 13

The ratio of recruits arriving at the feeders during the diffuse-light treatment decreased significantly … ….

Answer 13

with distance - shows that the effect of dance language vector information in greater further from the colony

Question 14

Overall, during periods in which they had oriented dances, colonies averaged … … … than when their dances were disoriented, but this effect varied significantly in different seasons…

Answer 14

greater food collection (increase in mass)

During summer, colonies gained similar mass under either treatment; during autumn they similarly lost mass regardless of treatment; but during winter, colonies gained mass while under the oriented light treatment and lost mass while under the diffuse-light treatment

Question 15

These results demonstrate that, under natural foraging conditions, the communication of distance and direction in the dance language can…

Answer 15

increase the food collection (and therefore fitness) of honeybee colonies

Question 16

They also demonstrate that bees use this … information in locating the food sources advertised in the dance.

Answer 16

directional

Question 17

About …-… as many recruits came to the feeders without directional information, presumably relying on learning the … of the feeder from the dancing bees and then searching for this in the field.

Answer 17

one-third, scent

Question 18

The evolution of recruitment communication in social insects is probably steered by whether, for particularly colonies and habitat sizes, a recruitment mechanism increases food collection more than it decreases it. Different habitats and, as shown here, different … within habitats can vary in this payoff.

Answer 18

seasons