A hungry bee approaches a sister bee and places her proboscis into the sister's mouth. This triggers a response in the sister: if she has food in her crop, she will regurgitate some of the food so that the hungry bee can ingest it from inside her mouth. This mouth-to-mouth transfer of food is known as trophallaxis. Both bees stroke each other's antennae while engaging in this behavior, and research has demonstrated that the antennae are an important part of this process because the bees are exchanging both olfactory and gustatory information.
According to author and bee enthusiast Sue Hubbell, researcher John Free, while working at the Rothamsted Institute in England, found that the antennae were essential in making bees feed one another, and those bees that had lost their antennae were fed less often. In one experiment she describes, bees tried to feed freshly severed heads with intact antennae, and they even tried to feed cotton balls in which antennae-like wires had been inserted.
Recipient bees can learn the odor of a food provided by a donor bee in a single trial. Mariana Gil and Rodrigo De Marco at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina found that honey bees' recall is better when the odor of the donated food is more concentrated. These observations support the idea that bees are exceptionally proficient at learning cues that will be useful for them when they need to locate valuable food sources in the future.
Bees are very hygienic animals - they don't like to be dirty or dusty. Keeping their bodies clean is a good way to keep debris out of the colony, reducing the chance that bee nurseries will develop infections and decreasing the likelihood that food supplies will be contaminated. Moreover, if a honey bee's eyes or antennae are soiled, their sensors might not function correctly, and that would be detrimental to the entire colony unit because it might put them at risk.
Honey bees have body parts specifically designed to help them stay clean, including a variety of bristles on their limbs that they use to clean body parts they can reach themselves, such as the mouth, proboscis, and antennae. The most notable cleaning structure is called the antenna cleaner, a peculiar-looking notch on the foreleg of a honey bee that is designed to slip over the antenna and remove any dust, pollen, or debris. After foraging and before flying home, honey bees will clean their eyes with their forelegs, and they will then pull their antenna through this special notch to clean up.
Grooming is an ordinary activity that is common among bees, but a very specialized honey bee Apis mellifera that seemed to be "compulsive" about social grooming was described by Darryl Moore at East Tennessee State University and colleagues. They named the bee Red 93, and she groomed other bees with her mandibles 84 percent of the time she was under observation. She never developed into a forager at the normal age of approximately twenty-one days, and even when she was thirty-one days old she was still dedicated to grooming other bees; the authors report that she is the most highly specialized bee groomer on record.
Only twice among the 315 observed acts of social grooming was her grooming invited by the recipient bee. On all the other occasions, Red 93 simply approached a nest mate and directly began cleaning one or more of her body parts for a brief period, usually less than a minute. She then would immediately initiate contact with a nearby bee and commence grooming it. Uncharacteristically specialized behavior in bees has been observed by others on a few occasions, and it raises many intriguing questions about how the mechanisms that regulate behavior can go awry. Under normal circumstances, honey bees perform a grooming invitation dance to solicit grooming from a nest mate.
They stand in one spot and rapidly vibrate their body from side to side, sometimes stopping briefly to self-groom. Benjamin Land and Thomas Seeley at Cornell University determined that bees performing this dance are far more likely to be groomed by a nest mate than bees that do not solicit grooming in this way. When the researchers puffed chalk dust onto the base of the wings of bees in their experiments, they found that those bees danced more than bees that only received puffs of air, suggesting that the particles may trigger a need to be cleaned and hence the dance.
Bees also engage in grooming behavior to rid themselves of mites. U.S. Department of Agriculture biologists Robert Danka and Jose Villa provoked five hundred honey bees to groom themselves by placing a tracheal mite on each individual bee using an eyelash mounted on a small stick. Some of the bees were genetically mite-resistant and some were from a susceptible strain.
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