Waggle Dance Your Own Way: Individuality, Network Structure, and an Herbicide Stressor in Recruitment, Foraging, and Neurobiology in the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera L.)
| dc.contributor.author | McHenry, Laura Covington | en |
| dc.contributor.committeechair | Couvillon, Margaret Jane | en |
| dc.contributor.committeemember | Spivak, Marla | en |
| dc.contributor.committeemember | Schuerch, Roger | en |
| dc.contributor.committeemember | Taylor, Sally Vann | en |
| dc.contributor.committeemember | Gross, Aaron Donald | en |
| dc.contributor.department | Entomology | en |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-10-23T08:00:19Z | en |
| dc.date.available | 2024-10-23T08:00:19Z | en |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-10-22 | en |
| dc.description.abstract | The waggle dance of the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) is perhaps the most celebrated animal communication behavior. With a waggle dance, a forager bee who has discovered a profitable resource on the landscape, usually floral nectar or pollen, can inform her nestmates of its location and recruit them to exploit it by communicating both a distance and a direction. Since Karl von Frisch described the waggle dance in 1942, scientific exploration of the dance has exploded into the realms of its structure, function, role in the regulation of collective foraging in the context of the hive as a super-organism, and even its utility as a study system for understanding sublethal behavioral effects of pesticide exposure. This dissertation presents three novel studies of the waggle dance. In the first, we asked whether consistent inter-bee differences (i.e., individuality) in a waggle dance distance - duration calibrations could affect communication success. In the second, we characterized the networks of recruitment arising from waggle dance communications and explored the role of the aforementioned individuality in network formation. In the third, we tested whether sublethal exposure to glyphosate (GLY), the most-applied herbicide in the world, could affect foraging, recruitment, or the levels and balance of biogenic amines in the bee brain. In each of these experiments, we housed bees in clear-walled observation colonies and trained cohorts of bees to visit artificial feeders to record both foraging and recruitment data. In our first experiment, we found that individuality in waggle dance behavior does shape communication outcomes, indicating that individual-level behavioral differences should not be discounted as factors at work in eusocial insect societies. In the second, we present the first network density and dance burstiness data from in vivo bee networks, revealing that recruitment networks are sparse, and waggle dancers are partitioned into bursty and non-bursty behavioral types. In the third, we show that not only can sublethal GLY exposure reduce foraging, but it can also produce significant correlations between levels of the important insect neurotransmitter octopamine and its two biosynthetic precursors, tyramine and tyrosine, where levels in control bees were unrelated. The results of this dissertation research, while distinct by experiment, together emphasize the continuing usefulness and tractability of the honey bee colony as a system in which to study the role of individuality in animal communication and to better understand the threat posed by non-insecticidal pesticide chemistries to the planet's most economically impactful pollinator. | en |
| dc.description.abstractgeneral | One of the most famous and well-studied animal behaviors is the waggle dance of the honey bee. A honey bee's waggle dance works similarly to a Yelp review for a restaurant: a bee who has found a good food source, like a flower patch offering especially sweet nectar or high-quality pollen, can come back to the colony and recommend it to her nestmates with a dance. The waggle dance is even more specific than a Yelp review, however, in that it also gives instructions to find the food source, communicating both a distance and a direction so that dance followers can go out into the landscape and look for the food source themselves. Even though the waggle dance has been studied extensively since it was first described by Karl von Frisch in the 1940s, there are still unknowns about how it works, and how it might be impacted by certain stressors. This dissertation presents three different experiments aimed at shedding light on these unknowns. First, it has recently been shown that there are consistent differences between bees in the way they communicate distance in the dance, and we tested whether that between-bee individuality can affect the likelihood that two bees will communicate successfully. Second, we studied how information about a food source moves from bee to bee via the waggle dance to form a communication network. Specifically, we described how efficiently information moved from bee to bee, patterns of dancing behavior, and the role of that individuality in its formation. Third and lastly, we looked to see whether exposure to a weedkiller called glyphosate (GLY) could affect either honey bees' waggle dance or food-collecting behavior, as well as levels of certain neurotransmitters in their brains that are involved in those behaviors. In all three experiments, we collected our data by housing bees in a clear-walled observation hives that let us view and film their waggle dance behavior, and then training groups of bees to collect artificial nectar from a feeder station that we provided, so we could also observe them as they collected food. We found that individuality in waggle dance communication can indeed affect the likelihood of communication success between two given bees, where the likelihood of communication success is greater when the dancer communicates a farther distance to the food source than the follower would. In the second experiment, our study of the waggle dance communication network showed that (1) information does not flow from bee to bee very efficiently, and (2) bees either dance quite regularly or sporadically. As far as we know, we are the first to describe these aspects of the waggle dance communication network, which may be useful in the field of computing algorithms inspired by living organisms. Finally, our third experiment showed that mild GLY exposure not only reduced how frequently bees collected food from our feeder, but also changed the relative amounts of certain neurotransmitters in their brains. This result emphasizes the importance of understanding how weedkillers that are not meant to target beneficial insects like honey bees are actually affecting them, so that we can make better-informed decisions to protect honey bees and other good insects. | en |
| dc.description.degree | Doctor of Philosophy | en |
| dc.format.medium | ETD | en |
| dc.identifier.other | vt_gsexam:41521 | en |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10919/121376 | en |
| dc.language.iso | en | en |
| dc.publisher | Virginia Tech | en |
| dc.rights | In Copyright | en |
| dc.rights.uri | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ | en |
| dc.subject | Honey Bees | en |
| dc.subject | Waggle Dance | en |
| dc.subject | Foraging | en |
| dc.subject | Communication | en |
| dc.subject | Networks | en |
| dc.title | Waggle Dance Your Own Way: Individuality, Network Structure, and an Herbicide Stressor in Recruitment, Foraging, and Neurobiology in the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera L.) | en |
| dc.type | Dissertation | en |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Entomology | en |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University | en |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | en |
| thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy | en |
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