Dr Fabio Manfredini
The molecular basis for dance language understanding in honey bees
During my postdoc at Royal Holloway I have been the coordinator of one axis of the ERC project “Honeybee communication: animal social learning at the height of social complexity”. The 5-year project, funded by the European Union, was conceived by Prof Elli Leadbeater (Royal Holloway, University of London) in collaboration with Prof Seirian Sumner (University College London) and Dr Yannick Wurm (Queen Mary, University of London).
BACKGROUND. Honey bees dance to communicate the location of new foraging areas or nesting sites to their nest mates. Foraging bees perform waggle dance to communicate the distance, direction and quality of resources, allowing rapid information transfer through groups of up to 60,000 bees. Hence, the analysis of dance behaviour is a key tool in biology to understand how information flows across social groups and shapes their structure. Despite the large amount of research that has been performed in the past on honey bee waggle dance, there are several aspects of this process that still remain obscure. One of them is deciphering how the information is passed from dancer bees to followers that are recruited to the foraging areas from a neurogenomic point of view. In fact, the brain of followers respond to the view of the dance and is able to extrapolate the location of a food source that is located outside of the hive and often far away.
AIM OF THE PROJECT. In this project we want to reveal the genomic basis for waggle dance decoding in follower bees by adopting two main approaches: (A) we will characterize the molecular regulation of the brain regions that are involved in cognition, spatial/motor learning and memory during the perception of the waggle dance; (B) we will investigate what molecular mechanisms are responsible for succeeding or failing to locate the food source. In fact, there is high variation in the success of follower recruitment after waggle dance, and by characterizing the source for this variation we will address a major question in the analysis of social behaviour.
Top, from left: 1) luring bees with a grass coated with sugar water; 2) bee feeding on a 2M sugar solution; 3) paint-marking bees with enamel colours. Bottom, from left: 4) Zara (research assistant) training bees to follow the feeder; 5) trainee bees (colour-coded) on the feeder; 6) bees flying through a tunnel that modify their perception of distance; 7) recording bee dances in an observation hive.
