Dance floor clustering: food-anticipatory behavior in persistent and reticent honey bee foragers

The honey bee time memory enables foragers to return to a profitable food source in anticipation of the time of day at which they previously collected food from that source. The time memory thus allows foragers to quickly resume exploiting a source after interruption, at the appropriate time of day, without the costs associated with having to rediscover it. A portion of a foraging group (the persistent foragers) will reconnoiter a previously profitable source and may do so for several days. The remaining bees (the reticent foragers) await confirmation of availability before revisiting the source. Recent work has shown that both persistent and reticent bees make extracurricular flights to alternative sources when one food source ceases being productive. Little else, however, is known about reticent foragers. In the present study, we determined that reticent bees congregate near the hive entrance in anticipation of the learned foraging time as do persistent foragers. We then confirmed that the food-anticipatory clustering takes place on the waggle dance floor, as suspected, but also found differences in the number of days that persistent and reticent foragers continue clustering. Finally, we found that persistent foragers had significantly more rewards per day at the source than did reticent foragers, supporting the hypothesis that experience at a food source influences a forager's decision to become either persistent or reticent. Our findings demonstrate that persistence and reticence are not immutable characteristics of foragers themselves but rather strategies they employ toward different food sources.