Trends in Biosciences

Social insects have developed various kinds of communication mechanisms, which allow them to effectively allocate workers to the different tasks, need to be carried out. Communication facilitates the allocation of tasks within the group and underlies a wide range of highly flexible and adaptive collective behavior, including cooperative hunting, nest building, migration, coordinated defense and group foraging. This is especially true for species living in large colonies. Workers of stingless bees inform their nestmates about the presence of food, its location, using different modes of communication, viz., thorax vibrations and jostling exhibited within the nest; footprint secretions and pheromone marks deposited in the field. In addition, the ability of workers of social bees to learn food odors plays an important role for a quick location of food sources in the field. The learning of food odors within the nest plays an important role in the foraging behavior of a scent trail laying stingless bee sheds new light on the complex interactions between olfactory signals and cues in this specialized communication mechanism. Although recruits can be precisely guided to feeding sites by means of trail pheromones, they still rely on previously learned food odors for short-range orientation. Chemicals derived from food sources or released by foragers are of the utmost importance for the localization and exploitation of food, as well as for the recruitment of stingless bees. Orientation towards food odors by foraging animals is surely an ancestral characteristic that can be found throughout the entire animal kingdom. Beyond this, in eusocial insects the odor of a food source, which is passed on from one worker of a colony to others, and which then biases the food-searching behavior of these individuals in the field, functions as social communication.