Dancing Bees Communicate Foraging Preferences in Row Crop Production Systems

There are still significant knowledge gaps in our understanding of how and when bees collect food in the environment. Our research utilizes the waggle dance, a form of communication unique to honey bees that conveys the vector, that is, distance and direction, from their hive to the resource, namely nectar and pollen. We observed, decoded, mapped, and analyzed waggle dances and collected pollen samples from three observation hives over the crop growing season (April-Sept) at the Tidewater Research Station, Suffolk, Virginia. The station comprises 412 acres of agricultural research land devoted to crops such as cotton, soybean, corn and peanut. This site will allow us to explore how honey bees forage in crops broadly considered self-pollinating and, importantly, in settings implicated in declining bee health (i.e., settings with a high probability of insecticide drift and residues).