ABSTRACT

Already at school, probably all of us have learned that bees perform dances that map the position of a food source. This is certainly true-but only for the honey bees (Apini; about ten species), which merely constitute a meager 1% of all eusocial bee species within the Apidae family. So far, we do not have the least evidence for dances encoding either the direction or the distance of a food source among the remaining 99%, comprising the stingless bees (Meliponini; more than 400 species) and

Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 199 Ecological Considerations ............................................................................................................. 201

Resource Availability ................................................................................................................. 201 Competition over Food Sources .................................................................................................202 Inferences on Recruitment Mechanisms ....................................................................................203

Of Jostling and Buzzing: The Early Findings by Lindauer and Kerr ............................................204 Why Had Forager Sounds Not Been Noticed before 1953? ......................................................204 The Alerting Hypothesis ............................................................................................................205

The Recruiter’s Excitement ............................................................................................................205 The Food Source’s Value and the Recruiter’s Excitement .........................................................205 The Agitation Threshold ............................................................................................................206 Excitement and Motion ..............................................................................................................206