Abstract
Communication is a fundamental feature of animal societies and helps their members to solve the challenges they encounter, from exploiting food sources to fighting enemies or finding a new home. Eusocial bees inhabit a wide range of environments and they have evolved a multitude of communication signals that help them exploit resources in their environment efficiently. We highlight recent advances in our understanding of bee communication strategies and discuss how variation in social biology, such as colony size or nesting habits, and ecological conditions are important drivers of variation in communication strategies. Anthropogenic factors, such as habitat conversion, climate change, or the use of agrochemicals, are changing the world bees inhabit, and it is becoming clear that this affects communication both directly and indirectly, for example by affecting food source availability, social interactions among nestmates, and cognitive functions. Whether and how bees adapt their foraging and communication strategies to these changes represents a new frontier in bee behavioral and conservation research.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e2219031120 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
| Volume | 120 |
| Issue number | 24 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 6 Jun 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank two anonymous reviewers for comments that helped improve this article. D.A.A. was funded by a grant of the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq, grant: 164743/2020-0). E.A.G. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (Advanced Grant resiliANTawarded to Laurent Keller) and the University of Lausanne.A.B.was supported by institutional funds from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (No. 12P4167) and the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India (No. 12-R&D-TFR-5.04-0800 and 12-R&D-TFR-5.04-0900). M.H. was funded by a CNPq grant (311590/2019-5). R.K. was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (grant: BB/W001977/1).
Funding Information:
We thank two anonymous reviewers for comments that helped improve this article. D.A.A. was funded by a grant of the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq, grant: 164743/2020-0). E.A.G. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (Advanced Grant resiliANT awarded to Laurent Keller) and the University of Lausanne. A.B. was supported by institutional funds from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (No. 12P4167) and the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India (No. 12-R&D-TFR-5.04-0800 and 12-R&D-TFR-5.04-0900). M.H. was funded by a CNPq grant (311590/2019-5). R.K. was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (grant: BB/W001977/1).
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2023 the Author(s).