Neurobiology
The waggle dance of the honeybee is a classical paradigm in behavioral biology. LMU neurobiologists have now investigated how the neuronal circuits process and encode the information communicated during the dance.
10.10.2017
Excerpt from LMU press release of October 10, 2017:
Beating a flight path to food
When a honeybee returns to the hive after a successful foraging trip, the insect communicates the location of the food source she has found to her fellow-workers by performing the so-called waggle dance. The scout’s orientation during the dance indicates the direction of the food source, while the duration of the performance itself reflects its distance from the hive, thus enabling her sisters to localize the site she has discovered. A study carried out by LMU neurobiologists Thomas Wachtler and Ajayrama Kumaraswamy now throws new light on how her conspecifics manage to decode the information in the darkness of the hive. In cooperation with colleagues led by Hiroyuki Ai at the University of Fukuoka in Japan, they have examined the role of nerve cells that respond to the vibrations produced by the dancing bee. Their findings, which have now been published in the Journal of Neuroscience, provide insights into the perception and processing of these informational stimuli by the honeybee brain.
Journal of Neuroscience 2017