| Authors |
Maurer Michael, Rüther Matthias, Bischof Horst, Kastberger Gerald, Hötzl Thomas, Weihmann Frank, Singh Madhusudan Man |
| Appeared in |
Measuring Behavior 2010 7th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research |
| Date |
August 2010 |
| Abstract |
Giant honeybees (Apis dorsata) nests display a series of layers of colony members around a single comb and may have more than 1.5 m in horizontal span. Nesting in the open, they have evolved a variety of defense strategies. Against predatory wasps, they produce highly coordinated wave-like cascades termed ‘shimmering’, whereby a collective of hundreds of bees flip their abdomens upwards simultaneously and in a cascadic way within a split second (see Figure 1). It has been already proved that these Mexican-wave-like traits form signals of anti predatory impact for external addressees and are prone of repelling predatory wasps. However, the question is whether they also contribute for colony-intrinsic information such as reporting the momentary defensive state of the colony.
To investigate this colony-intrinsic aspect, we analyzed the functional architecture of the bee curtain with high spatial and temporal accuracy using a non-invasive measuring system that enables a 3D reconstruction of position and posture of colony members at the nest surface during shimmering waves. A portable stereo recording setup with two high-resolution cameras (2352 x 1728 px; 60 Hz) acquired image sequences of the shimmering waves in the field on an expedition in Nepal 2009, allowing simultaneous assessment of the individual positions of hundreds of surface bees regarding the three dimensions of space (x,y,z) at the given frame rate and with an accuracy of fractions of a millimeter. |
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