Individuality impacts communication success in honey bees.

Abstract

In eusocial insects, individual variation and its influence on emergent outcomes, like communication success between foragers, remain poorly understood¹. The honey bee waggle dance is a celebrated communication behavior that conveys to nestmates a distance and direction from the hive to a valuable resource, usually nectar or pollen². Intriguingly, each forager possesses an individual calibration to communicate the resource's distance³, but the effect of this individuality on recruitment success is unknown. Here we tested whether the magnitude and/or direction of calibration mismatch in dancer-follower dyads affects their ability to communicate. We created fully-marked observation colonies and trained bees to forage from artificial feeders at known distances. Concurrently, we filmed dances inside the colony to identify successful dancer-follower dyads. We then compared the distribution of calibration mismatch values among these successful dyads (n = 30) to a simulated expected distribution based on a null hypothesis of random assortment of calibration values. Surprisingly, mismatch magnitude did not affect recruitment (p = 0.74), but mismatch direction did: followers predicted to overshoot the resource were over-represented among successful dyads compared to the null distribution (p = 0.03). Overall, our data demonstrate that the calibration relationship in dancer-follower dyads, created by individual differences, can shape communication outcomes.