By deciphering honeybees’ wobble dances that tell other bees where to find food, researchers have found that bees travel farther in agricultural areas than in urban areas. The results are published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology.
In the study, researchers from Royal Holloway University and Virginia Tech decoded 2,827 wiggle dances in 20 western honeybee colonies in London and surrounding agricultural areas. The information conveyed in the dances showed the researchers that foraging distances were consistently shorter in urban areas compared to agricultural areas.
The researchers calculated that bees in urban areas had an average foraging of 492 meters, compared to bees in agricultural areas, which had an average foraging of 743 meters.
They also found no significant difference in the amount of sugar collected by urban and rural bees, suggesting that the longer foraging distances in rural areas were not far away, nectar-rich resources, and that urban areas consistently provided more food for honeybees posed.
Professor Elli Leadbeater of Royal Holloway University and author of the study said, “Our results support the idea that cities are hotspots for social bees, with gardens that offer diverse, abundant and reliable food resources. In agricultural areas, honeybees are likely to have a harder time finding food, so they’ll have to go further before they can find enough to bring them back to the hive. “
The researchers warn that since urban areas make up only a small percentage of total land cover, they are unlikely to be enough to feed bee populations in a landscape dominated by intensive agriculture.
Professor Leadbeater said, “Conservation efforts should be aimed at increasing the amount of uncultivated flowers in agricultural areas such as wildflower strips. This would increase the consistency of the available forage across the season and landscape, and minimize the bees’ dependence on small plant numbers. “
There are several challenges in evaluating and comparing floral resources in different habitat types. For example, large areas have to be surveyed to get a good picture of the abundance of flower species, and in cities it is almost impossible to reach land in private gardens.
“In this study, we took the hurdles out of evaluating flower resources by letting the bees tell us where to find food.” Said Professor Leadbeater. “The calculation of the distance to the feed, which is indicated by the waggle dances, provides a real-time picture of the current feed availability from the perspective of the bees.”
The waggle dance is unique to honey bees and is used to communicate the location of the flower resources to the beehive. When a honey bee returns to the hive with food, instead of immediately looking for food again, it will repeat a figure-eight movement on the honeycomb. The duration of the central run of this dance tells other bees how far to fly, and the angle tells them which direction to go.
In the study, researchers recorded a total of 2,827 waggle dances in 20 locations between April and September 2017: 10 in central London to represent urban land and 10 on agricultural land in Kent, Surrey and the other homeland counties. Then they deciphered these dances and found where the bees had been.
They also collected data on the sugar concentration from the feed by collecting 10 returning bees each time they visited the hive and prompting the burping of the collected nectar. This allowed researchers to validate their assumption that prolonged foraging was due to a lack of available forage rather than the existence of distant but high quality resources.
Because the study focused on domesticated and non-threatened honey bees, the researchers warn that the results will not apply to all bee species. Professor Leadbeater said, “While we may be able to extrapolate our results to some wild bees, such as generalist bumblebee species, our results should not be used to imply that this pattern applies to all bee species. For many solitary bees, the existence of specialists is important. Host plant species or nesting sites will be important in determining whether cities are valuable habitats. “
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