Waggle Dance Your Own Way: Individuality, Network Structure, and an Herbicide Stressor in Recruitment, Foraging, and Neurobiology in the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera L.)

The waggle dance of the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) is perhaps the most celebrated animal communication behavior. With a waggle dance, a forager bee who has discovered a profitable resource on the landscape, usually floral nectar or pollen, can inform her nestmates of its location and recruit them to exploit it by communicating both a distance and a direction. Since Karl von Frisch described the waggle dance in 1942, scientific exploration of the dance has exploded into the realms of its structure, function, role in the regulation of collective foraging in the context of the hive as a super-organism, and even its utility as a study system for understanding sublethal behavioral effects of pesticide exposure. This dissertation presents three novel studies of the waggle dance. In the first, we asked whether consistent inter-bee differences (i.e., individuality) in a waggle dance distance - duration calibrations could affect communication success. In the second, we characterized the networks of recruitment arising from waggle dance communications and explored the role of the aforementioned individuality in network formation. In the third, we tested whether sublethal exposure to glyphosate (GLY), the most-applied herbicide in the world, could affect foraging, recruitment, or the levels and balance of biogenic amines in the bee brain. In each of these experiments, we housed bees in clear-walled observation colonies and trained cohorts of bees to visit artificial feeders to record both foraging and recruitment data. In our first experiment, we found that individuality in waggle dance behavior does shape communication outcomes, indicating that individual-level behavioral differences should not be discounted as factors at work in eusocial insect societies. In the second, we present the first network density and dance burstiness data from in vivo bee networks, revealing that recruitment networks are sparse, and waggle dancers are partitioned into bursty and non-bursty behavioral types. In the third, we show that not only can sublethal GLY exposure reduce foraging, but it can also produce significant correlations between levels of the important insect neurotransmitter octopamine and its two biosynthetic precursors, tyramine and tyrosine, where levels in control bees were unrelated. The results of this dissertation research, while distinct by experiment, together emphasize the continuing usefulness and tractability of the honey bee colony as a system in which to study the role of individuality in animal communication and to better understand the threat posed by non-insecticidal pesticide chemistries to the planet's most economically impactful pollinator.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Entomology

Department dc:contributor.department

Entomology

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• McHenry, Laura Covington

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Couvillon, Margaret Jane

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Spivak, Marla
• Schuerch, Roger
• Taylor, Sally Vann
• Gross, Aaron Donald

• Honey Bees
• Waggle Dance
• Foraging
• Communication
• Networks

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:41521

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/121376