Returning from a successful foraging trip, a well-loaded forager bee has two things on its mind; offloading its cargo and telling the rest of the hive the good news. But communication is often a two-way thing. Rodrigo de Marco decided to investigate Martin Lindauer's original suggestion that assistant bee's receiving nectar from the returning forager might influence the forager's enthusiasm to communicate its find().
Designing an enclosed environment where he could control the nectar inflow to the hive while supplying a single trained bee with a regulated nectar intake, De Marco filmed the trained bee's dance sequences when the hive was awash with nectar and when it had fallen on harder times. Analysing the insect's responses, De Marco realised that the probability of the forager bee dancing declined when the hive was well supplied with nectar, while unloaded bees danced more enthusiastically when the hive was short of nectar. The forager was able to respond to tiny fluctuations in the hive's nectar supply and pitch its dances accordingly.
De Marco suspects that the forager recognises how eagerly the assistant unloads the nectar cargo, playing its message down in times of plenty and dancing frenetically when nectar is scarce.
