Sugar intake elicited locomotor behaviours in flies and honey bees

Abstract

Foraging behaviour is one of the most successful experimental paradigms to study navigation. Insects are highly capable and efficient navigators (Rüdiger 2020; Menzel 2023). Honey bees are unique in that they evolved the capability to communicate the location of profitable food sources to nest mates through dance communication (Frisch 1967). However, the evolution of dance remains largely unresolved (Price and Grüter 2015; Barron and Plath 2017). Interested in the question of how social behaviour or communication evolved from solitary behaviour, Vincent Dethier drew attention to similarities between a local search behaviour in flies and the honey bee dance (Dethier 1957). He was also the first to describe sugar-elicited search behaviour, a particular form of local search that is initiated after taking in a small amount of food. Typical local search behaviour includes a highly tortuous walk with high turning rate, and frequent returns to the location of the sugar drop.