Temporal effects of sugar intake on fly local search and honey bee dance behaviour

Abstract

Honey bees communicate navigational information of profitable food to nestmates via dance, a small scale walking pattern. Hungry flies and honey bee foragers initiate a sugar-elicited local search that involves path integration and show similarities with dance behaviour. Using a comparative approach, we explored the temporal dynamics of initiation of local search and dance in flies and honey bees, respectively. Passive displacement experiments showed that feeding and initiation of search can be spatially dissociated in both species. Sugar intake increased the probability to initiate a search but onset of walking starts the path integration system guiding the search. When prevented from walking, the motivation to begin a path integration-based search was sustained for 3 min after sugar intake in flies and bees. In flies, the behavioural parameters of search were significantly reduced for 3 min but were higher than flies that were given no sugar stimulus, indicating some degree of meander. These results suggest that sugar elicits two independent behavioural responses: path integration and increased turning, and initiation and duration of path integration system is temporally more restricted. Honey bee dance experiments demonstrated that the motivation of foragers to initiate dance was sustained for 15 min, whereas the number of circuits declined after 3 min. Based on our findings, we propose that the food-intake during foraging has the capability to activate the path integration system in flies and honey bees, and this interaction might have been elaborated during evolution to guide the walking pattern of the honey bee dance.