Complex social waves of giant honeybees provoked by a dummy wasp support the special-agent hypothesis

Abstract

The social waves in Giant honeybees termed as shimmering are more complex than Mexican waves. It has been demonstrated1 that shimmering is triggered by special agents at the nest surface. In this paper, we have used a nest that originated by amalgamation of two previously separated nests and stimulated waves by a dummy wasp moved on a miniature cable car. We illustrate the plausibility of the special-agent hypothesis¹ also for complex shimmering processes.

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Figures and Tables

Figure 1 Snapshots from Movie S1, recorded in Chitwan, Nepal in Jan 2009. The bees produced shimmering waves in response to a moving dummy wasp (the black and white-striped cuboid above the nest, which was moved by a miniature cable car). The sequence starts at frame 694 and ends with frame 747; in the last frame (775) the dummy wasp had already been moved back again to the right side. The stimulation started at frame 0 and continued over 3,500 frames. The frames were recorded with a HDT V camera at a frame rate of 50 Hz. See text for details.

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