Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Adjacent Honey Bee Colonies Locally Partition Their Foraging Across Landscapes

Area of Science:

• Ecology
• Animal Behavior
• Behavioral Ecology

Background:

• Optimal foraging theory (OFT) suggests animals maximize resource acquisition, leading to resource partitioning or convergence.
• Honey bees (Apis mellifera) use waggle dances to communicate resource locations, providing a window into their collective foraging decisions.
• Understanding honey bee foraging patterns is crucial for assessing their ecological strategies and competition dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether neighboring honey bee colonies partition foraging resources at the landscape or local level.
• To test predictions of optimal foraging theory in the context of honey bee collective decision-making.
• To determine if honey bees converge on shared resources or divide them among colonies.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of 8049 waggle dances from honey bee colonies across three distinct landscapes.
• Examination of interdance distances and k-nearest neighbor analyses to assess spatial distribution of foraging.
• Application of k-means clustering to identify nonrandom aggregation of dance locations within and between colonies.

Main Results:

• No significant difference was found in distances between dances from the same colony versus different colonies.
• Dances from the same colony were not more likely to be close neighbors compared to dances from different colonies.
• K-means clustering revealed that dance locations advertised by the same colony aggregated nonrandomly, with 62% of clusters comprising dances from a single colony.

Conclusions:

• Honey bees partition foraging resources at the local level, not the landscape level.
• This local partitioning strategy likely serves to minimize direct competition between neighboring colonies.
• The findings support a nuanced view of optimal foraging theory in social insects, highlighting local-scale resource management.