( g the mechanisms of leaderless societal...)Undergraduate research shows leaderless honeybee organizing

Different from the famous “waggle dance” that foraging worker bees perform to tell other bees where to find a food source, the vibration signal appears to be a more general, multi-purpose form of communication. Schneider has concluded that this signal, which consists of one bee grabbing another bee (worker or queen) and then vibrating its body, does not convey a specific message, but instead is a form of “modulatory communication” that alters existing bee behaviors (making bees perform their jobs more actively, perhaps) or changes bees response to other signals.

Pierce and Schneider have documented in their current paper how workers use the vibration signal to prepare the queen for swarming by making intrusions into her “court” and vibrating her hundreds of times an hour. She responds by changing her behavior -- reducing her food intake, slowing egg laying and becoming more active. At this point, the workers begin to send a second signal that researchers call “worker piping” at a fevered pitch. Piping, which consists of bees making contact and vibrating their wing muscles rapidly, appears to be a general instruction to fly.

The researchers document that the workers stop using the vibration signal when the queen flies and leaves the nest with the swarm. Piping, however, continues in the swarm, as the bees need to make the queen fly again once a new nest site has been selected.

“Drew Pierce did this project last summer,” Schneider explained. “We constructed a special observation stand where we could actually see how workers were interacting with queens inside a swarm cluster, where they are hanging in a tree. That was really interesting, because nobody had ever really been able to look at that before,” he noted.

“What was interesting was h
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Source:University of North Carolina at Charlotte