Читать книгу Honey Bee Medicine for the Veterinary Practitioner - Группа авторов - Страница 81

Another dancing behavior also recognized by Karl von Frisch long ago was the tremble dance. He described the dance as a strange behavior – a neurosis – where the bees run about the combs making constant trembling movements of their bodies, similar to the disease known as St. Vitus' dance or chorea, but von Frisch was not able to identify its significance (Seeley 1995). The tremble dance is a long signal, persisting approximately 30 minutes, occurring throughout the broodnest portion of the hive. Seeley later deciphered its meaning, discovering that the tremble dance was used by foragers to recruit more nectar processing bees when a nectar flow results in increased nectar arriving at the hive without enough bees to help unload the food source (Seeley 1992). In a clever experiment Seeley switched the dancing behavior of foraging bees from performing the waggle to the tremble dance by only changing one variable: how long it takes for a foraging bee to unload its nectar resource. When a foraging bee experienced a search time of 20 seconds or less to find a food storing bee to unload its nectar, she performed the waggle dance, whereas a search time of 50 seconds or more resulted in the tremble dance (Seeley 1992). Through this work, Seeley and others determined that the tremble dance had multiple meanings: it stimulates a shift to processing nectar for bees working inside the hive, and to stop recruiting additional foragers for bees gathering nectar outside the hive. The waggle and tremble dances of foraging bees are now known to be complementary behaviors working in concert to keep a colony's rate of nectar collecting and processing balanced (Seeley 1995).