Honey Bee Colonies and Their Foraging Patterns

The honey bees (Apis mellifera) are social insects, having high ecological and economical importance. They are generalist as species, but flower specialized on an individual level (Pankiw & Page, 2000). The species are naturally found in most of Europe, except the Azores and northern regions such as Iceland, the Faroe Islands and northern Scandinavia (De la Rúa et al., 2014).

There are 10 subspecies described in Europe and 28 recognized cross-fertile species around the world (Engel, 1999). Because of their economical value, European honey bees can be found everywhere around the globe, except Antarctica (Mortensen, Schmehl, & Ellis, 2013). Only in the United States of America (USA) crops pollinated by the bees have been assessed to be worth $15 billion (Mortensen et al., 2013). Moreover, they provide people with honey, pollen, wax, royal jelly, and propolis (Mortensen et al., 2013).

Honey bees live in large families. They are eusocial insects, meaning they create casts consisting one queen, some males (drones) and thousand worker bees (T. D. Seeley, 1995). Honey bees, as other insects undergo complete metamorphosis. Meaning their lifecycle consists of 4 life stages: egg, larva, pupa and adult. Worker bees are the ones doing most of the job in the hive. At different stages of adulthood, they have to clean up the hive, feed the larvae and the queen, produce honey, and at the latest stage of their life they become the foragers, collecting pollen, nectar and water (T. D. Seeley, 1995).

Because of the large size of the colony, honey bees need large amount of food and diverse food sources. To share information with others about the food locations, the method honey bees use is a waggle dance or a round dance depending on the distance to the source. Waggle dance is used to share details about the found resources (further then 100m) such as nectar, pollen, water and propolis (von Frisch, 1967) or possibly, nest sites too (M. J. Couvillon et al., 2012). The dance has two main faces, waggle run and a return phase, where the bee goes back to the starting point to keep doing next waggle run (Grüter & Farina, 2009).

In the waggle run, duration determines the distance, the orientation relatively to gravity – the direction to the resource (von Frisch, 1967). If resources are found close to the nest (around 100m) dance is a sequence of running circuits with bee changing directions after completing rounds (von Frisch, 1967). The number of circuits of waggle runs increase with better resource quality and the speed of dance increases with the necessity of resources (Thomas D. Seeley, Mikheyev, & Pagano, 2000).