Piping behavior describes a series of high-pitched sounds that reverberate through the colony. Karl von Frisch and others originally identified these noises as part of the language that the queen uses at particular times to assert her presence. Recent research has discovered that mature, forager-aged workers also pipe under particular circumstances, and a lot has been learned about this form of communication.
Picture the piping queen: she presses her thorax against the comb and vibrates her flight muscles without spreading her wings, producing short bursts of sound that are detected by other bees with sensors in their legs. The old queen sometimes pipes before swarming, when the colony outgrows its hive and divides itself. After she has swarmed with a portion of the workers in search of a new nest site, one or more virgin queens normally are ready to emerge from their queen cells to supercede or replace her.
The first virgin queen to emerge produces piping sounds, and another queen that is still in her cell but is ready to emerge may respond with a deeper sound that has been characterized as quacking. The piping of the queen causes the workers in the colony to freeze in place until the piping stops, stopping their work of trying to release another queen by chewing away the wax and fibers capping her cell.
This duet or dialog may continue for days at a time and may serve to suppress the emergence of an extra queen, which, if it occurred, would typically lead to a fight to the death. Thomas Seeley and Jurgen Tautz described the piping behavior of mature workers as similar to queen piping, with the important distinction that the piping worker pipes other bees directly: the worker usually presses her body or head against the queen or a sister worker, pulls her wings tightly over her abdomen, and arches her abdomen downward.
Then she vibrates her wing muscles and short, high-pitched bursts of sound are produced. An important function of this behavior is to cause the recipients to warm their flight muscles in preparation for "liftoff" prior to swarming, but workers may pipe the queen intensely for several days or weeks prior to the departure of the swarm, and the meaning of this behavior is not yet understood.
Andres Pierce and his colleagues were curious to see if piping continues once a swarm has left the nest, and they built an observation stand so that for the first time a swarm cluster hanging on a tree could be studied while the bees waited for scouts to guide them to their new location. What they found was fascinating. Workers seemed to pay little attention to the queen in the swarm until shortly before the time for liftoff approached.
Then the pipers became quite excited, scrambling through the swarm cluster piping intensely and interacting with the queen at very high rates, and also piping workers at high levels, stimulating every bee to warm their flight muscles. When Seeley and Tautz experimentally removed piping bees from the outer layers of a swarm cluster and used an infrared camera to measure the temperature of the flight muscles of individual bees, they found that the bees did not warm up their flight muscles when the piping was absent. It is clear that piping behavior is a complex but very fundamental aspect of bee communication.
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08152010
1. What is special about bees living in colonies
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