Honeybee foragers clearly are flexible in how they use information.
If a familiar food source remains unrewarding, foragers
increasingly follow dances advertising alternative food sources.
Grüter & Ratnieks (2011) found a slow
and gradual increase in the number of waggle runs followed per
dance as foragers experienced the continued unavailability of
their familiar food source
Recent research has demonstrated that honeybee foragers do not
blindly follow the instructions of their successful nestmates after
following a dance. Rather, they have a flexible information use
strategy and use the waggle dance information in a context- and
content- dependent way
Grüter, C., Segers, F. H., & Ratnieks, F. L. (2013). Social learning strategies in honeybee foragers: do the costs of using private information affect the use of social information?. Animal Behaviour.
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