Stingless bees and honeybees prefer scent-marked food sources, while honeybees show the strongest preference for floral color cues, with differences in body size and visual orientation.

A Comparative Study of Food Source Selection in Stingless Bees and Honeybees: Scent Marks, Location, or Color

Plebeia droryana stingless bees can guide nestmates in the direction of food sources, but not the distance, but the exact mechanism for this communication remains unclear.

Foragers of the stingless bee Plebeia droryana inform nestmates about the direction, but not the distance to food sources

The honey bee communicates directional information through its dances, enabling recruits to locate food sources more effectively than food sources at an equal distance in the opposite direction.

Communication of Direction by the Honey Bee

Stingless bees communicate height and distance within the nest, while direction is communicated outside the nest, using sound pulses and scent marks for long-distance orientation.

Potential mechanisms for the communication of height and distance by a stingless bee, Melipona panamica

The honeybee waggle dance is a multicomponent signal, with location information being a backup component for when environmental information on food sources is unavailable or of poor quality.

The honeybee waggle dance: can we follow the steps?

Honey bees use landmarks to guide their return to a food source, but instead store a two-dimensional snapshot of their surroundings, guiding their movements to reduce discrepancies between the snapshot and their current retinal image.

How honey bees use landmarks to guide their return to a food source

Honey bees' dance language is an adaptation to the specific habitats in which they evolved, allowing them to locate food sources more efficiently in tropical environments.

Why do honey bees dance?

Honeybees use an optimal Lévy flight searching strategy and odour-mediated anemotaxis to locate new food sources, focusing on scents upwind and ignoring unscented or unrewarding targets.

Honeybees use a Lévy flight search strategy and odour-mediated anemotaxis to relocate food sources

Honey bees rely heavily on the color and shape of food sources and landmarks to navigate during foraging, with distance information being less reliable.

Influence of visual targets and landmarks on honey bee foraging and waggle dancing

Honeybees can navigate to distant food sources by recalling familiar scents, even when the food source is no longer present.

Scent-triggered navigation in honeybees

Honeybees can use the directional information in round dances to find nearby food sources, supporting the view that round dances are waggle dances indicating nearby food sources.

Do honeybees use the directional information in round dances to find nearby food sources?

Stingless bee foragers communicate the location of their food source through a "jotling run" but the exact mechanism remains unclear.

Recruitment behavior in stingless bees, Melipona scutellaris and M. quadrifasciata. II. Possible mechanisms of communication.

Information flow in bumble bee colonies mediates colony foraging activity, enabling them to base their decision to forage on demand and the presence and profitability of food sources.

Information flow and regulation of foraging activity in bumble bees (Bombus spp.)

Stingless bee Melipona panamica can recruit newcomers to a specific direction, distance, and canopy level without using scent trails, potentially relying on their sophisticated recruitment system.

A stingless bee (Melipona panamica) indicates food location without using a scent trail

Honeybee colonies with oriented dances recruit more effectively to syrup feeders, while disoriented dances are less effective for recruiting to natural sources.

Honeybee colonies achieve fitness through dancing

The food recruitment dance of Melipona panamica stingless bees shows no significant differences between feeding in opposite directions, but foragers with rich food sources tend to unload food with their bodies oriented 180° from the entrance.

The food recruitment dance of the stingless bee, Melipona panamica

Honeybees follow the waggle dance to communicate the rhumb line to a food source, which they then translate into Cartesian map coordinates, guiding their search for the source.

Honey Bees Get Map Coordinates from the Dance

The scent of returning forager bees can communicate to hivemates about current floral resources and is associated with specific crop and field scents.

The Scent of Individual Foraging Bees

Mandibular gland secretions of worker bees play a role in nest defense and defense communication, but do not signal food source locations.

Mandibular gland secretions of meliponine worker bees: further evidence for their role in interspecific and intraspecific defence and aggression and against their role in food source signalling

Honey bees locate food sources by olfaction, not distance and direction information in the recruitment dance, with recruitment efficiency increasing as odor accumulates in the hive.

Honey Bee Recruitment to Food Sources: Olfaction or Language?

How do bees communicate the location of food sources?

These studies suggest that bees communicate the location of food sources using a combination of scent marks, visual cues, dances, sound pulses, and landmarks.