I read with interest the paper "Polydomy enhances foraging performance.” Recent work by Tom Seeley showed that hives in apiaries are more susceptible to pathogen increase than hives that are isolated from one another. 

I suggested the possibility of inter-colony communication as a driver, possibly leading to exploiting weak or undefended colonies, thus enhancing spread of varroa and pathogens. 

My idea was that bees in apiaries tend to drift from one colony to the next, especially when the whole apiary is actively foraging. This would lead to the extensive (though inadvertent) sharing of forage information. 

To me, it’s clear that this readily happens, and that there would be an accrued benefit. An analogy would be the tracking of cell phone users to identify automobile traffic patterns and then using that information to make route changes to avoid traffic bottlenecks.

Several researchers assured me there would be no benefit to such a phenomenon, even if it took place. This paper shows the benefit:

We investigated whether communication between polydomous nests contributes to decrease search times for unknown food sources. These results confirm that dispersed central-place foraging contributes to decrease food search time not only for nests that are close to the food source, but also for more distant nests, which presumably benefit from inter-nest communication (e.g. inter-nest recruitment to the food source or food exchange between nests).   

Once the first nest found the food, communication facilitated the second nest getting access to food to a similar extent in both treatments.  Inter-nest communication allows farther-away nests to also benefit from discoveries by sister nests and experience lower search times (global benefit). 

Our results therefore indicate that polydomy can increase the foraging range not only of the colony as a whole, as discussed in previous studies, but also of individual nests, which gain easier access to far away resources via the presence of intermediary sister nests.

Stroeymeyt N, Joye P, Keller L. 2017 Polydomy enhances foraging performance in ant colonies. Proc. R. Soc. B 284: 20170269.

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