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Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share with their hive mates information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new housing locations.12 Thus the waggle dance is a mechanism whereby successful foragers can recruit other bees in their colony to good locations for collecting various resources. It was once thought that bees had two distinct recruitment dances — round dances and waggle dances — the former for indicating nearby targets and the latter for indicating distant targets, but it is now known that a round dance is simply a waggle dance with a very short waggle run (see below). Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch was one of the first who translated the meaning of the waggle dance.3
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Description
A waggle dance consists of one to 100 or more circuits, each of which consists of two phases: the waggle phase and the return phase. A worker bee's waggle dance involves running through a small figure-eight pattern: a waggle run (aka waggle phase) followed by a turn to the right to circle back to the starting point (aka return phase), another waggle run, followed by a turn and circle to the left, and so on in a regular alternation between right and left turns after waggle runs. Waggle-dancing bees produce and release two alkanes, tricosane and pentacosane, and two alkenes, Z-(9)-tricosene and Z-(9)-pentacosene, onto their abdomens and into the air.4
The direction and duration of waggle runs are closely correlated with the direction and distance of the patch of flowers being advertised by the dancing bee. Flowers located directly in line with the sun are represented by waggle runs in an upward direction on the vertical combs, and any angle to the right or left of the sun is coded by a corresponding angle to the right or left of the upward direction. The distance between hive and recruitment target is encoded in the duration of the waggle runs.5 The farther the target, the longer the waggle phase, with a rate of increase of about 75 milliseconds per 100 meters.
Waggle dancing bees that have been in the hive for an extended time adjust the angles of their dances to accommodate the changing direction of the sun. Therefore, bees that follow the waggle run of the dance are still correctly led to the food source even though its angle relative to the sun has changed.
The consumption of ethanol by foraging bees has been shown to reduce waggle dance activity and increase occurrence of the tremble dance.6
Evolution
Observations have suggested that different species of honeybees have different "dialects" of the waggle dance, each species or subspecies dance varying by curve or duration.78 A recent study demonstrated that a mixed colony of Asiatic honeybees (Apis cerana cerana) and European honeybees (Apis mellifera ligustica) were gradually able to understand one another's 'dialects' of waggle dance.9
Applications to operations research
In line with recent work in swarm intelligence research involving optimization algorithms inspired by the behavior of social insects and animals such as fish, birds, and ants, recently there has been research on using bee waggle dance behavior for efficient fault-tolerant routing.10 From the abstract of Wedde, Farooq, and Zhang (2004)11:
In this paper we present a novel routing algorithm, BeeHive, which has been inspired by the communicative and evaluative methods and procedures of honey bees. In this algorithm, bee agents travel through network regions called foraging zones. On their way their information on the network state is delivered for updating the local routing tables. BeeHive is fault tolerant, scalable, and relies completely on local, or regional, information, respectively. We demonstrate through extensive simulations that BeeHive achieves a similar or better performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.
Another bee-inspired stigmergic computational technique called bee colony optimization is employed in Internet Server Optimization.1213
References
- ^ Riley, J. R. et al. (12 May 2005) The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance. Nature 435, pp. 205-207. doi:10.1038/nature03526
- ^ Seeley, T.D., P.K. Visscher, and K.M. Passino. (2006) Group decision making in honey bee swarms. American Scientist. 94:220-229.
- ^ Frisch, Karl von. (1967) The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
- ^ Thom et al. (21 August 2007) The Scent of the Waggle Dance. PLoS Biology. Vol. 5, No. 9, e228 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050228[1]
- ^ Riley, J. R. et al. (12 May 2005) The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance. Nature 435, pp. 205-207. doi:10.1038/nature03526
- ^ Bozic J., C. Abramson, M. Bedencic. (April 2006) Reduced ability of ethanol drinkers for social communication in honeybees (Apis mellifera carnica Poll.). Alcohol. Volume 38 , Issue 3. pp. 179-183.
- ^ Gould J, Towne W (1987) The evolution of the dance language. American Naturalist 130: 317–338.
- ^ Dyer FC, Seeley TD (1991) Dance dialect and foraging range in three Asian honeybee species. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. 28: 227–233.
- ^ Su S, Cai F, Si A, Zhang S, Tautz J, et al. (2008) East Learns from West: Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees. PLoS ONE Volume 3, Number 6: e2365 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002365 [2]
- ^ Crina, Grosan; Abraham Ajith. (2006) Stigmergic Optimization: Inspiration, Technologies and Perspectives. Studies in Computational Intelligence. Vol. 31. pp. 1-24. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg. ISBN 978-3-540-34689-0
- ^ Wedde HF, Farooq M, Zhang Y (2004). "BeeHive: An Efficient Fault-Tolerant Routing Algorithm Inspired by Honey Bee Behavior". Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3172: 83–94.
- ^ Nakrani, S. and C. Tovey, (2004) "On Honey Bees and Dynamic Server Allocation in Internet Hosting Centers". Adaptive Behaviour. Vol. 12, Issues 3-4. pp.223-240.
- ^ C. Tovey, (2004) "The Honey Bee Algorithm: A Biological Inspired Approach to Internet Server Optimization". Engineering Enterprise. Spring 2004, pp.13-15.
Further reading
- Gould JL (1975). "Honey bee recruitment: the dance-language controversy". Science 189:685−693.
- Riley JR, Greggers U, Smith AD, Reynolds DR, Menzel R (2005). "The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance". Nature 435:205-207.
- Seeley TD (1995). "The Wisdom of the Hive". Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- von Frisch K (1967). "The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees". Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
See also
External links
- Communication and Recruitment to Food Sources by Apis mellifera — USDA-ARS (accessed 2005-03)
- Honeybee Communication — Kimball's Biology Pages (accessed 2005-09)
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