Benefits of recruitment in honey bees: effects of ecology and colony size in an individual-based model

Why do some social insects have sophisticated recruitment systems,while other species do not communicate about food source locationsat all? To answer this question, it is necessary to identifythe social or ecological factors that make recruitment adaptiveand thus likely to evolve. We developed an individual-basedmodel of honey bee foraging to quantify the benefits of recruitmentunder different spatial distributions of nondepleting resourcepatches and with different colony sizes. Benefits of recruitmentwere strongly dependent on resource patch quality, density,and variability. Communication was especially beneficial ifpatches were poor, few, and variable. A sensitivity analysisof the model showed that under conditions of high resource densityrecruitment could even become detrimental, especially if foragingduration was short, tendency to scout was high, or recruitsneeded a long time to find communicated locations. Colony size,a factor often suspected to influence recruitment evolution,had no significant effect. These results may explain the recentexperimental findings that in honey bees, benefits of waggledance recruitment seem to vary seasonally and with habitat.They may also explain why some, but not other, species of socialbees have evolved a strategy to communicate food locations tonest mates.