A tremble dance is a dance performed by forager

honey bee A honey bee (also spelled honeybee) is a eusocial flying insect within the genus ''Apis'' of the bee clade, all native to Afro-Eurasia. After bees spread naturally throughout Africa and Eurasia, humans became responsible for the current co ...

s of the species ''

Apis mellifera The western honey bee or European honey bee (''Apis mellifera'') is the most common of the 7–12 species of honey bees worldwide. The genus name ''Apis'' is Latin for "bee", and ''mellifera'' is the Latin for "honey-bearing" or "honey carrying", ...

'' to recruit more receiver honey bees to collect

nectar Nectar is a sugar-rich liquid produced by plants in glands called nectaries or nectarines, either within the flowers with which it attracts pollinating animals, or by extrafloral nectaries, which provide a nutrient source to animal mutualists ...

from the

workers The workforce or labour force is a concept referring to the pool of human beings either in employment or in unemployment. It is generally used to describe those working for a single company or industry, but can also apply to a geographic regio ...

History of discovery

The tremble dance was first described by

Karl von Frisch Karl Ritter von Frisch, (20 November 1886 – 12 June 1982) was a German-Austrian ethologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. His work centered on investigations of ...

in the 1920s (who was also first to describe the

waggle dance Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nect ...

), but no light was shed on its function until 1993 when Wolfgang Kirschner discovered that, when performed, the dance stopped nearby workers from flying to gather more nectar.

Function

The tremble dance of the honeybee is similar to the

, but is used by a forager when the foraging bee perceives a long delay in unloading its nectar or a shortage of receiver bees, sometimes due to low numbers of receiver bees. It may also spread the scent released during the forager's waggle dance. Like the waggle dance, the tremble dance is likely one of two "primary regulation mechanisms" for regulating bee colony behavior at the group level, and one of four or five observed mechanisms known to be used by honeybees to change the task allocation among worker bees.

Linkage to ethanol consumption

The consumption of

ethanol Ethanol (abbr. EtOH; also called ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol, drinking alcohol, or simply alcohol) is an organic compound. It is an Alcohol (chemistry), alcohol with the chemical formula . Its formula can be also written as or (an ethyl ...

by foraging bees has been shown to increase the occurrence of the tremble dance while decreasing the occurrence of the waggle dance.Bozic J., C. Abramson, M. Bedencic. (April 2006) Reduced ability of ethanol drinkers for social communication in honeybees (Apis mellifera carnica Poll.). ''Alcohol.'' Volume 38 , Issue 3. pp. 179-183.

References

Sources and further reading

*Arnold et al. (September 2002) Intra-Colonial Variability in the Dance Communication in Honeybees (''Apis mellifera''). ''Ethology'' Vol. 108, Issue 9. pp. 751–761. *Biesmeijer, J. C. (May 2003) The occurrence and context of tremble dancing in free-foraging honey bees (Apis mellifera). ''Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.'' Volume 53, Number 6. pp. 411–416. *Dyer, Fred C. (January 2002) The biology of the dance language. ''Annual Review of Entomology.'' Vol. 47. pp. 917–949. *Schneider, Stanley S.; Lee A. Lewis. (2003) Honey bee communication: the "tremble dance", the vibration signal and the "migration dance", in: Webster T. (Ed.) ''Monographs in honey bee biology.'' Northern Bee Books, West Yorks, Great Britain. Vol. 1, pp. 1–26. *Schneider, Stanley S.; Lee A. Lewis. (March 2004) The vibration signal, modulatory communication and the organization of labor in honey bees, ''Apis mellifera''. ''Apidologie.'' Vol. 35, Issue 2. pp. 117–131. *Seeley, Thomas D. (July 1997) Honey Bee Colonies are Group-Level Adaptive Units. ''The American Naturalist.'' Vol. 150, Supplement: Multilevel Selection. pp. S22-S41. *Seeley, Thomas D. (June 1999) Born to Dance. ''Natural History.'' Vol. 108, Number 6. pp. 54–57. *Takeshi, Otani. (2001) Dance performance at very near distance from the honeybee hive. ''Honeybee Science.'' Vol. 22, Number 3. pp. 127–138. *Thom, Corinna. (2002) Dynamics and Communication Structures of Nectar Foraging in Honey bees (Apis mellifera). ''Dissertation zur Erlangung des naturwissenschaftlichen Doktorgrades der Bayerischen Julius-Maximilians -Universität Würzburg.''

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