Why search time to find a food-storer bee accurately indicates the relative rates of nectar collecting and nectar processing in honey bee colonies

Abstract Abstract. When a honey bee laden with nectar returns to the hive, she acquires information about the balance between her colony's nectar collecting rate and its nectar processing capacity by noting the time spent searching to find a food-storer bee (who unloads and stores the forager's nectar). By modelling this search process, and experimentally testing a basic prediction of the model, search time was found to be an accurate indicator of the ratio of the two variables, with reliability guaranteed by the rules of probability. For example, if the collecting rate increases while the process capacity remains constant, then the proportion of food storers in the unloading area decreases, hence there is an automatic increase in the expected number of bees that a forager must sample before finding a food-storer bee.

• Publication year

  1994

• Venue

  Animal Behaviour

• Publication date

  1994-02-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Mathematics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1006/ANBE.1994.1044
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• No references are available for this paper.

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