DOI: 10.5061/dryad.7d7wm385g
title: Colony, subspecies and seasonal variability in honeybee defensive behaviour

description: Poets, philosophers, and politicians have used bees and often projected an
 idealized human society into their view of how bee hives are organized,
 from the ancient Greeks to the present times. We first review how the
 division of labour in honeybees was perceived by human observers, before
 presenting our current understanding. We focus specifically on defensive
 behaviour and show that this model provides an interesting case study for
 our conceptual understanding of the division of labor as a whole. We
 distinguish three phases of the defensive response: detection of an
 intruder, recruitment of individuals into collective defense, and attack.
 Individual bees may selectively contribute to one or more of these steps.
 Guard bees monitor entering conspecifics or attacking mammals, and release
 an alarm pheromone to recruit stinging soldiers. However, we are still far
 from understanding why only subsets of bees become guards or soldiers (or
 even if soldiering can be considered a task per se). We discuss the
 stimuli associated with each of these steps, how they define the number of
 bees needed, and how they might combine with individual and developmental
 characteristics such that individuals take on a particular task. We also
 highlight pending questions and interesting avenues for future research.
description: # Colony, subspecies and seasonal variability in honeybee defensive
 behaviour
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7d7wm385g](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7d7wm385g) ## Description of the data and file structure Fig. 1: This data was collected in the course of several experiments testing the defensive behaviour of honeybees with the same protocol. Pairs of bees were placed into a circular arena and confronted with a rotating dummy for 3 min, that they could choose to sting or not. During the test, the bees were exposed to either a solvent control (TEC or MO) or the main component of the alarm pheromone, IAA, at 10% vol/vol in the respective solvent. Fig. 2: This data was collected to compare the defensive behaviour of Apis mellifera mellifera and Apis mellifera carnica. It consisted of a field test in which a small leather flag (7 x 4 cm) was waved by a motor in front of the hive entrance for 2 min. Each trial was video recorded, and the number of bees on the landing board before the disturbance or actively releasing the sting alarm pheromone during the disturbance was scored from the videos. At the end of the trial, the number of stingers embedded in the leather flag was also counted to determine the number of bees that stung. Fig: 3: This data was collected in the course of experiments testing the defensive behaviour of honeybees, with the same protocol as in Fig. 1. These experiments were performed in Brisbane, Australia, either during summer (May-June) or during winter (July-August). ### Files and variables #### File: Data.xlsx **Description:** Each sheet contains the data pertaining to one figure. The last sheet ("labels") is a key for the abbreviations used in the file. ##### Variables (Fig. 1 & Fig. 3) * Odours: TEC = triethyl citrate (solvent), MO = mineral oil (solvent), IAA = isoamyl acetate (10% vol/vol in respective solvent). * The data is encoded by 0 or 1 for each trial, with: 0 = no bee stung and 1 = at least one bee of the pair stung. NaN = no data. ##### Variables (Fig. 2) * Nber = number * SAP = sting alarm pheromone * Nber of bees Xmin/s prior = number of bees on the landing board on a single video frame taken Xmin/s before the disturbance started * Average nber of bees on landing board = average from the bee counts taken 2min, 1min and 1s before the disturbance (previous 3 columns) * NaN indicates missing data All other variable names are self-explanatory.