Roger Schürch
The past few weeks have been a blur with the end of classes for the year, but also the publishing of 2 new #HoneyBee #WaggleDance manuscripts from two former PhD students. These papers show the usefulness of waggle dance decoding both as an applied instrument as well as a tool for exciting basic research. Thread 1/n
May 16, 2025 at 7:09pmWeb
Show threadRoger SchürchMay 16, 2025
First, embedded in Dr. Maggie Couvillon’s (@freelyflyingbees.bsky.social) and my Bees-As-Bioindicators project, Dr. Rob Ostrom has investigated how a new housing development on prime forging habitat impacts honey bees (https://doi.org/10.1242/bio.061807). He found that bees faced increased foraging costs because their foraging distances doubled on average after the loss of prime habitat. 2/n
Show threadRoger SchürchMay 16, 2025
Since the generalist honey bee is suspected to be a bioindicator for other pollinators, we think that other bees may be impacted in the area as well. While the result may seem almost trivial (bees can’t forage on construction sites), the paper importantly demonstrates the usefulness of waggle dance prediction as a relatively low-labor method to study impacts of rapidly changing environments on pollinators. 3/n
Show threadRoger SchürchMay 16, 2025
Second, Dr. Brad Ohlinger who was co-advised by Dr. Couvillon and myself, used our extensive data set of decoded waggle dances to answer a question that we are often asked (http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ece3.71401): how do bees from different colonies in an apiary behave when they are foraging – do they converge on the same high quality resources or do they partition the landscape to avoid each other? Brad analyzed over 8000 waggle dances from 9 colonies to discover that bees partition, although locally. 4/n
Show threadRoger SchürchMay 16, 2025

This might represent the best of both worlds, allowing them to exploit the highest quality resources, possibly near where other colonies are also foraging, but with enough partitioning to minimize competition.

I want to thank both former students for their hard work and dedication to get these papers over the finish line.

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