Floral scents learned inside the honeybee hive have a long-lasting effect on recruitment

Floral scents learned during the waggle dance, a signal through which honeybees provide nestmates with spatial information on foraging sites, are an important component of recruitment. Forager bees can be reactivated to go to previously exploited food sources by perceiving scents they learned at the flowers within the dance context. Here, we tested whether floral scents experienced not at the foraging site, but via scented nectar inside the nest, can influence subsequent recruitment. We determined that bees that were exposed to scented food while in the hive tended to follow dances in which the recruiting bee presented the same odour experienced 8 days earlier. Moreover, a higher proportion of bees with in-hive experience were successfully recruited to the feeding sites scented with the experienced odours than to the feeding sites scented with novel odours. This bias in recruitment was independent of the time that the bees spent following dances. These findings suggest that associative memories acquired even as early as the first week of adult life were responsible for a variation in recruitment. We discuss our results in terms of the adaptive value of the long-term olfactory memories acquired inside the nest as a facilitator to decode the spatial information transmitted in the honeybee dance.

► Interaction between learning and communication is essential for understanding the success of honeybee foraging.
► Honeybees can learn food scents inside the hive, even during the first week of their adult life span.
► In-hive floral scent memories can be recalled several days after learning and within the dancing context.
► Early learned olfactory information biases dance-following behaviour and recruitment.