Benjamin H Paffhausen, Julian Petrasch, Uwe Greggers, Aron Duer, Zhengwei Wang, Simon Menzel, Peter Stieber, Karén Haink, Morgan Geldenhuys, Jana Čavojská, Timo A Stein, Sophia Wutke, Anja Voigt, Josephine Coburn, Randolf Menzel
As a canary in a coalmine warns of dwindling breathable air, the honeybee can indicate the health of an ecosystem. Honeybees are the most important pollinators of fruit-bearing flowers, and share similar ecological niches with many other pollinators; therefore, the health of a honeybee colony can reflect the conditions of a whole ecosystem. The health of a colony may be mirrored in social signals that bees exchange during their sophisticated body movements such as the waggle dance. To observe these changes, we developed an automatic system that records and quantifies social signals under normal beekeeping conditions...
2021: Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience