Alarm cues alter nursing behavior in aggressive honey bee colonies (Apis mellifera)

Communication is a critical feature of animal societies. This is particularly true for large, eusocial insect societies. Communication can become more difficult, however, in the face of competing information, especially if that competing information is also a conspecific signal that the receiver is specially tuned to. Furthermore, social context can be important for understanding how social animals respond to any signal. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) provide a unique opportunity to study how different conspecific signals interfere with each other. They live in large, dense, enclosed nests where more than a dozen different pheromones can be in play at once. I conducted an experiment to test the ability of nurse honey bees to appropriately respond to larval cues when presented with alarm pheromone, a conspecific signal which they are able to detect but typically show a low behavioral sensitivity to. I found that nurses that originated from high-aggression colonies decreased their larval care behaviors in the presence of alarm pheromone, suggesting that this conspecific signal interferes with the nurses’ ability to either detect or respond to larval signals. Meanwhile, nurses from low-aggression colonies did not decrease their larval care when alarm pheromone was present. This research demonstrates that social signals can influence critical parental care behaviors in honey bees in social-context-dependent ways.