What makes a honeybee scout?
What makes a honeybee scout?
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DOI：
10.1007/s00265-006-0331-9
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发表时间：
2007-05-01
影响因子：
2.3
通讯作者：
Sumpter, David J. T.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Beekman, Madeleine;Gilchrist, Amy L.;Sumpter, David J. T.
蜂群需要划分其劳动力，以便它执行的每项任务都分配有适当数量的工人。这种任务分配系统需要足够灵活，以便群体能够快速适应不断变化的环境。在这项研究中，我们研究了蜜蜂群体调节侦察员（未经引导寻找新食物来源的觅食者）和新兵（通过招募舞蹈引导寻找食物来源的觅食者）之间分工的可能机制。具体来说，我们研究了招募舞蹈的可用性和工人基因型在从事侦察的工人数量的群体水平调节中的作用。我们的方法有三个。我们首先开发了一个数学模型来证明，成为侦察兵或新兵的决定可以通过潜在的觅食者是否能在一定时间内找到招募舞蹈来调节。然后，我们通过调查舞蹈可用性对现场球探监管的影响来测试这个模型。最后，我们调查了成为童子军的概率是否有遗传基础。我们的现场数据支持这样的假设：侦察兵是那些未能按照我们的模型预测找到招募舞蹈的觅食者，但我们发现基因型对觅食者成为侦察兵的倾向没有影响。
A honeybee colony needs to divide its workforce so that each of the many tasks it performs has an appropriate number of workers assigned to it. This task allocation system needs to be flexible enough to allow the colony to quickly adapt to an ever-changing environment. In this study, we examined possible mechanisms by which a honeybee colony regulates the division of labor between scouts (foragers that search for new food sources without having been guided to them) and recruits (foragers that were guided via recruitment dances toward food sources). Specifically, we examined the roles that the availability of recruitment dances and worker genotype has in the colony-level regulation of the number of workers engaged in scouting. Our approach was threefold. We first developed a mathematical model to demonstrate that the decision to become a scout or a recruit could be regulated by whether a potential forager can find a recruitment dance within a certain time period. We then tested this model by investigating the effect of dance availability on the regulation of scouts in the field. Lastly, we investigated if the probability of being a scout has a genetic basis. Our field data supported the hypothesis that scouts are those foragers that have failed to locate a recruitment dance as predicted by our model, but we found no effect of genotype on the propensity of foragers to become scouts.