Study
A Negative Feedback Signal That Is Triggered by Peril Curbs Honey Bee Recruitment
Nieh, J. C.
Current Biology, 2010
Foragers visiting a known feeder were attacked at the feeder — by a competitor, or by being briefly pinched — and their behaviour back at the hive recorded, in particular the brief vibratory signal delivered head-on to dancing bees.
- Studied in
- Apis mellifera
- Sample size
- foragers at controlled feeders with staged attacks
Bees that met danger at a food source returned and delivered stop signals to nestmates dancing for that source. The signal suppressed dancing, and its rate scaled with the danger encountered.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
The stop signal is a negative feedback signal that carries information about hazard at a specific food source and modulates recruitment to it.
How NatureHQ reads it
The waggle dance takes all the attention, and a recruitment system with only an accelerator would be a badly designed one. This is the brake, and it is the more interesting signal of the two: it is aimed at particular dancers, it is graded by how bad the experience was, and it changes what the colony does. It also breaks the tidy story — the dance does not simply broadcast where the food is, it competes with information from bees who found the same place dangerous.
- Staged attacks, at artificial feeders.
- The stop signal appears in several contexts, so a single function is unlikely to be the whole story.
- How dancers integrate stop signals with their own experience is not resolved.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Cell PressPublished in a Cell Press journal.
doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.12.060
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-31.