Are honey bees more likely to advertise larger patches of flowers?

The foraging strategy of honey bee colonies involves frequent exchanges of information. Honey bee foragers have a unique ability to convey the location of flower patches to their fellow foragers using a behavior called a waggle dance. Factors that affect net energy gain per foraging trip (such as nectar concentration and distance to the flowers) influence whether a forager will dance. In addition, the spatial arrangement of flowers affects the visitation rate of honey bees. For example, larger patches receive more visits per flower than smaller patches. However, we do not know whether this pattern of visitation is because a forager who encounters a larger patch is more likely to advertise it. To test this hypothesis, we set up arrays of artificial flowers where foragers could collect syrup from each flower. We trained foragers from each colony to visit small arrays of flowers, which we moved progressively until they were both sufficiently distant to produce waggle dances, and we individually marked the foragers that visited them. We then changed the array at one site so that it had more flowers than the array at the other site. By filming the behavior of our focal foragers on return to the hive, we assessed the effect of flower patch size on their probability of performing a waggle dance and the number of circuits that they performed. We discuss our results and their implications for understanding the foraging patterns of honey bees and the value of waggle dance communication in different landscapes.