Sneha Singhal, Jaypee Institute of information technology, Noida
Bees in rural areas which signal food sources through their waggle dance, travel further for food than their counterparts in urban areas. The study was published in the Journal of Applied Ecology of the British Ecological Society.
The recent study:
Study participants analyzed 2827 waggle dances recorded from 20 honeybee colonies in London and surrounding areas. According to the dances, foraging trips in urban areas were consistently shorter than those in agricultural areas. Foraging distances between bees in agricultural and urban areas differed from 492 meters to 743 meters, respectively. Similarly, they found no significant difference between urban and rural honeybees in sugar accumulation, indicating that urban honeybees have consistently more available resources while rural honeybees are more likely to travel long distances for nectar.
Their findings:
In cities, gardens provide diverse, plentiful, and reliable forage sources that may feed social bees. In agricultural areas, honeybees may find it harder to find food, thus having to travel further to find enough to feed their hive. According to the researchers, the low percentage of urban land cover cannot support bee populations across an intensively farmed landscape because urban areas constitute only a small portion of land cover. In agricultural areas, such as wildflower strips, conservation efforts should target increasing the number of flowers other than crops. This would increase the consistency of forage across the seasons and landscape and minimize the reliance on a few seasonal flowers that bees are dependent upon. Floral resource assessment and comparison in various habitat types is challenging. Large areas are needed to determine flower species richness, and there is little or no access to private gardens in cities.
Significance of the study:
“We were able to overcome the hurdle of assessing floral resources in this study by obtaining bees’ reports on where to find food.” Explained Professor Leadbeater. The waggle dance shows the distance to forage in real-time, from the bees’ point of view. Honeybees are unique in their use of the waggle dance, which communicates where floral resources are located to the hive. To avoid immediate departure to forage again, honeybees repeat a figure eight on the honeycomb when they return from foraging with food. Other bees calculate how far to fly from the dance based on how long the central run is, and the direction based on the angle.
Throughout the study, researchers recorded 2827 waggle dances at a total of 20 sites: 10 in central London represent urban land, and 10 in Kent, Surrey, and other counties in the home counties. Following that, they decoded the dances and pinpointed the locations of the bees. By capturing 10 returning bees on each hive visit and tricking them into regurgitating nectar collected during each visit, they also measured the sugar concentration of forages. In this manner, the researchers were able to test their hypothesis that longer foraging trips were due to a dearth of forage rather than the presence of resources that were far away but high-quality.
Conclusion:
Researchers warn that the findings will not apply to all bee species because of the study’s focus on honeybees, which are domesticated and are not threatened. While we might be able to extrapolate our findings to some wild species of bees, such as generalist species of bumblebees, this shouldn’t be interpreted as meaning that the same patterns will hold across all bee species. In determining whether solitary bees need cities for nesting, the presence of plants with special host properties will play a role.
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Reference:
- Samuelson, A. E., Schürch, R., & Leadbeater, E. (2021). Dancing bees evaluate central urban forage resources as superior to agricultural land. Journal of Applied Ecology, 1365-2664.14011. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14011
Author info:
Sneha Singhal is currently pursuing B.Tech in Biotechnology from Jaypee institute of information technology, Noida. She has a keen interest in research in bioinformatics and Genetics. She aspires to be a researcher in the future.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sneha-singhal
Publications:
- https://bioxone.in/news/new-crispr-cas-system-can-cut-rna-viruses/
- https://bioxone.in/news/a-photosynthesis-model-predicts-10-20-increase-in-crop-yields/
- https://bioxone.in/news/ancestral-brains-of-arthropods-revealed-by-new-fossils/
- https://bioxone.in/news/worldnews/dungeons-and-dragons-as-behavioural-therapy/
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