UC San Diego

We show that the stingless bees Melipona panamica and Partamona peckolti have a high precision of intra-patch recruitment that is influenced by forager-deposited odor marks in the field. We trained foragers to a 2.5 M sucrose feeder in the center of an array of five identical feeders (20 cm between feeders) at different distances and directions from the nest and measured the distribution of recruit visitations. In the free-foraging phase foragers could odor mark a filter paper around the experimental feeder, and in the odor-removal phase we substituted it each five minutes by a clean one. Significantly more recruits in both species chose the experimental feeder over the controls in the distance and directional arrays (P ≤ 0.034) and odor removal significantly decreased precision of recruitment in both species (P ≤ 0.034). Scent marks in both species thus play a significant role in orienting recruits to already known profitable food sources. © INRA, EDP Sciences, 2007.