Honors Program
Fine and Performing Arts Honors
Date of Award
12-2014
Thesis Professor(s)
Darrell Moore
Thesis Professor Department
Biological Sciences
Thesis Reader(s)
Karl Joplin, Scott Contreras-Koterbay
Abstract
It has been observed that returning honey bee foragers congregate with unemployed foragers and food receiver bees in a localized region of the hive known as the dance floor. Here, the returning foragers advertise food sources via the waggle dance. It was hypothesized that the close proximity of the dance floor to the hive entrance was related to foragers minimizing time and travel inside the hive. The hive entrance is conventionally located at the bottom of the hive. It was suggested that this location was ideal for easy removal of debris. This correlation between dance floor location and hive entrance location invokes further examination of the relationship. Is the hive entrance location used to establish dance floor location? Using scan sampling- the hive was visually scanned along rows in a descending fashion from the top right corner to hive entrance. The location of each observed waggle dance was recorded for 30 minutes. Observations were conducted for three consecutive days, then the hive entrance location was displaced. The observation hive was altered to contain three hive entrances located adjacent to the bottom first frame, adjacent to the center of the second frame, and adjacent to the middle of the third frame. Only one hive entrance was open at a given time. For the last three days of the experiment, the bottom hive entrance was made accessible again. Regardless of entrance position, the dance floor was seen to be established adjacent to the hive entrance.
Document Type
Honors Thesis - Withheld
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Corrigan, Chelsea E., "Relationship between Relative Hive Entrance Position and Dance Floor Location" (2014). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 474. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/474
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.