All the buzz—bigger honeybee colonies have quieter combs

January 23, 2018 by Lindsey Hadlock, Cornell University

When honeybee colonies get larger, common sense suggests it would be noisier with more bees buzzing around.

But a study recently published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology reports that bigger honeybee colonies actually have quieter combs than smaller ones.

"The surprising result was that - and at first I thought something must be wrong - when there are more bees on the comb, the vibrations are actually reduced," said Michael Smith, a doctoral student in neurobiology and behavior and the paper's lead author. Po-Cheng Chen, a former doctoral student in the field of electrical and computer engineering, is a co-author of the paper.

The researchers found the bees actively damp vibrations in the comb, possibly by the way they grasp the combs, though more study is needed to verify the mechanism.

The finding is important because bees communicate with substrate vibrations in the comb. Bees perform a waggle dance to communicate to other bees the exact location of a patch of flowers; the dance vibrates the comb to spread the message to other bees. Even queen bees transmit vibrational signals to communicate with other queens. But in order to convey these messages, or any message, one must eliminate noise.

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